Scholars

Thomas N. Headland

Senior Anthropology Consultant
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology

Agta Human Rights Violations

AGTA HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS: 
Why Southeast Asian Negritos are a Disappearing People

By Thomas N. Headland and Janet D. Headland 
(Compiled in January 1999)

The Agta Negrito people of the Philippines have suffered throughout the 20th century from harassments from outsiders, including Americans before World War Two. These human rights abuses have included, slavery, murders, kidnapping of children, and especially takeovers of their ancestral lands. In 1997, we published a report of these violations against the Agta in the journal Human Organization(volume 56, pp. 79-90), titled "Limitation of Human Rights, Land Exclusion, and Tribal Extinction." The examples below are condensed from that article:

Contents

A U.S. Army Captain Chain-Gangs Agta for Slave Labor 

The earliest abuse case on record was when a U.S. Army officer, Capt. Wilfrid Turnbull, stationed in Casiguran in the 1910s, forcibly moved the Agta onto a reservation and actually chain-ganged reluctant men together to get them to clear fields for cultivation (Turnbull 1930:40). [See the 1997 Human Organization article for the details and bibliographic references of these case studies.]

Land Takeover By a Mining Company 

One human rights case which caused devastating upheaval to one band of Agta occurred in the Dinapigui Valley, then part of the municipality of Casiguran, when the transnational Acoje Mining Company opened a magnesium open pit mine there in 1960. The company brought in large numbers of immigrants as employees. Many of these employees remained as permanent homestead farmers after the mine was closed down in the early ’70s. The manager of the Acoje mine, who was an American, drove the Agta off of their land in 1960, destroying their houses and crops with bulldozers to make room for the company’s buildings. Today the forest in that valley is gone and the whole area is dotted with farms. The Agta who once lived there are gone.

Two Massacres at Agta Camps 

One of the worst cases of Agta human rights violations occurred in the 1940s about 30 kilometers west of the town of Casiguran on the west side of the Sierra Madre. According to our Agta friends, a group of farmers led by a man named Rafael, with the nickname of Paeng, made a surprise attack on a camp of Agta. Three older Agta men, two of whom were in the camp at the time (and one of whom has a large scar from a bullet wound he received then), gave us in separate interview sessions detailed descriptions of the incident. We have confirmed that at least 23 Agta adults, plus several children, were massacred in this attack.5 Another massacre at an Agta camp occurred more recently, in 1985. On the afternoon of December 12, a government military unit of five soldiers attacked an Agta family on the Pinamakan River, in Casiguran, killing four Agta--a man, his wife, and two of their children. A third son, fourteen years old, was wounded in the leg, but escaped.6

Soldiers’ Treatment of Agta Prisoners 

This was not the only case of the abuse of Agta by soldiers during our tenure. In 1974, Lakaséw, an Agta teenage male, was caught allegedly stealing rice from a storeroom in a military camp in Casiguran. The next day, according to our source who witnessed the incident, the soldiers led Lakaséw out of their sleeping quarters and told him he could go. After he had walked a short distance down the road, they turned their rifles on him and shot him dead. In another incident, on October 9, 1978, soldiers ambushed a group of anti-government NPA guerrillas who were in the forest in Isabela Province. A four-year-old Agta girl was killed in that skirmish, and her Casiguran Agta mother was captured. We finally found the mother in confinement at a military headquarters in northern Luzon on February 13, 1979, where she and another Casiguran Agta prisoner, a 20-year-old mentally retarded girl, were being used for sexual purposes by the soldiers. After some patient diplomatic efforts in government offices in Manila, the two girls were released to us on April 2.8

The Poisoning of an Agta Camp In 1990 

On March 11, 1990, an entire camp group of Agta were accidentally poisoned by a group of six Ilokano farmers who poured a bottle of commercial insecticide into the river 300 meters above the Agta camp. This tragic event occurred on the headwaters of the Immurung River in the municipal area of San Jose, in the Province of Cagayan. The farmers were using the insecticide to catch shrimp. Fifty of the 56 Agta in the camp fell ill that afternoon after drinking water from the river. Six of these Agta died by nightfall. Several others were taken by logging truck to the clinic in San Jose for treatment; and the more serious cases were transferred from there to the government hospital at Tugegarao. The farmers eventually paid an indemnity of 7,000 pesos (equivalent to $264 U.S. dollars) to the relatives of the six dead Agta. Two other Agta men suffered permanent damage to their larynxes, so that they speak today only with great difficulty.9

The Agta Orphanage Program In Cagayan 

Change agents--whether government or private, American or Filipino--chronically stereotype Agta in negative terms in their written reports, often as a justification for imposing change upon them. Just fifteen years ago, the government-appointed Commissioner to the Non-Christian Tribes for Cagayan Province established what he called an orphanage for Agta children near the provincial capital. Part of his program involved rounding up Agta children in that province (not in Casiguran) to live permanently at the orphanage. It is rare to find people in our day and age who would justify removing children from their parents. Yet this man appears to have viewed his "development program" as saving Agta children from what he views as a primitive and thus deplorable way of life. His 1981 report to his financial supporters in the United States describes the Agta as a "Newly Found Tribe" of "cannibal[s] in the upper Sierra Madre." He defines them as

the most primitive, wild, fierce, and dangerous group ... a generation from the Stone Age ... having no clothes.... Fond of eating raw food such as meat ... [their] children unwanted and unloved ... ignorant of days, weeks, months, as well as years ... idolatry and adultery are supreme. [Cortez 1981]

 

He even quotes one Agta as saying, "The most delicious meat is the liver of human beings" (ibid.).

Land-Grabbing of Agta Fields 

Without a doubt, the main human rights violation against the Agta today, while less violent than kidnappings and mass murders, is the chronic usurpation of Agta land. Cultivated land is a highly valued commodity in the Philippines today, and land in Casiguran is no exception. Though the majority of lowland Filipinos in the Casiguran area treat the Agta fairly and show respect for their property rights, there are still a number of people there, as there are in all frontier areas, who are quick to take advantage of local tribal people. This is easy to do, because the Agta have virtually no political voice in eastern Luzon, and they are looked down on by the majority ethnic group.

It should be clear here that the Agta are not a people living at some pre-agricultural evolutionary stage of progression. That is, they are not "incipient farmers." While they fit into the typological definitions of hunting and gathering societies, they have cultivated small gardens for hundreds of years. The Agta’s production of agricultural foods was a minor yet important part of their economy throughout our years with them, with about a quarter of the households clearing small gardens each year, fields that average only one-seventh of a hectare in size. Both men and women spend only 6% of their daytime activities working in their gardens, and while the foods they produce provide important nutritional variety in their diet, and root crops as a hedge against hunger when they cannot secure rice through trade, the total amount produced from all their fields provides less than 10% of their food needs during the year (Headland 1986).

Agta cannot succeed as farmers because in almost all cases, when they clear a piece of land, it is taken over by lowlanders. This is the reason why they put so little time into farming today. In 1983, for example, we recorded nine cases of land disputes between Agta and non-Negrito farmers. In the same year we also mapped and recorded the histories of all of the 32 field sites that had been cleared since 1900 in a single river basin in one Agta band area. From 1900 to 1983, 19 of the 32 sites on the Koso river were cleared and cultivated by lowland homesteaders using Agta labor; and 13 of them were cleared by Agta for their own use. By 1983, all but 1 of the 13 sites had been taken over by lowlanders, 5 by direct force. Three others the Agta were pressured to sell to farmers. In the other 5 cases farmers just moved in and took over the land after the Agta had harvested their rice and were letting the land lie fallow.

When we first resided in the upriver Koso watershed in 1962, it was the exclusive domain of the Agta. Today it is completely taken over by outsiders and no Agta live there. The history of Koso field no. 19, for example, reads as follows (the names are pseudonyms):

Koso Field No. XIX. This land first opened by Agta just before the turn of the century. It was cleared again by Agta Goygoy and his nephews, and Agta Kidmin, in 1961, under the orders and supervision of the CNI [government] agent Tomas Casala. Soon after Kidmin died in 1964, a lowlander named Mondoy Malabutag claimed that Kidmin and Goygoy had sold the land to him for 10 gallons of nipa wine and 100 pesos [U.S.$25]. We [the Headlands] were involved with the Agta in legal disputes over this land for 3 years. The Agta eventually lost the case, and Malabutag now owns this land, which he planted in coconuts in the late 1960s. It is today [1995] a coconut grove with nuts harvested by Malabutag twice a year. [For further details on the takeover of this band area, and the history of the 32 fields, see Headland 1986:575-583.]

It has often been impossible for us to gain access to government documents concerning the Agta. We were fortunate, however, to be given access to the records of a government agent in charge of the Casiguran Agta for the four-year period from 1960 to 1963. We found in those documents, for just that short period in Casiguran, reports of 39 cases of land conflicts between Agta and non-Agta farmers. Another case was the 1.53 square-kilometer land reservation established for the Agta in Casiguran (see Headland 1985) but taken over by outsiders, making it impossible for the Agta to establish themselves there. Jean Peterson (1978a:9, 30, 70-71; 1978b:340, 342) also refers to the usurping of Agta fields by outsiders in Palanan, Isabela, 90 km north of Casiguran, and the conflicts those Agta encountered when they tried to take up farming in that area; and Bion Griffin (1991) reviews land usurpation and human rights violations in other Agta areas outside of Casiguran.

There are a number of archival reports from the early years of this century, as well, of how, when Casiguran Agta attempted serious cultivation, the more-powerful farming peoples interfered with them. Turnbull, the American army officer who in 1912 was attempting to make the Agta into farmers, reports the following: "There was quite a little opposition on the part of a few Casiguran people to this work with the wild [Agta] people--some fearing a lack of labor, others a loss of trade as a consequence" (Turnbull 1930:32).

Turnbull was correct, but these were not the only reasons the townspeople were against his project. They were also against his helping the Agta acquire arable land of their own. Ten years after Turnbull’s project began, the Casiguran Municipal Council wrote a formal resolution, titled Resolution No. 71 and dated July 14, 1923, objecting to the giving of land to the Agta because, the Resolution says, it gave "them greater area of land than the Christian [i.e., non-Agta] people residing at Casiguran." The final paragraph of this document petitions the Provincial Board, the Provincial Governor, and the President of the Philippine Senate to "suspend the advance" of Agta farmland at the reservation (Casiguran Municipal Council 1923).

Two documents published in 1913 (both quoted in Worcester 1913a:105-106) report in the same way how Tagalog farmers in the Province of Camarines Sur inhibited Agta there from clearing land for themselves by telling them they were forbidden to do so by the government. The second document states that the farmers in the area

repeatedly advised [the Agta] not to [clear land], assuring them that they would be punished by the monteros or forestry officials. . . . the only motive that those Tagalogs can have in thus misinforming the Negritos is that the latter may be obliged to remain in economic dependence on them. [Garvan, quoted in Worcester 1913a:106]

The American government recognized this kind of problem in the Philippines at the beginning of this century:

In 1913, the United States Secretary of the Interior wrote about the loss of ancestral land in his annual report to the American President. "As soon as they have cleared the land and brought it under cultivation they are driven from it by false claims of ownership on the part of their civilized neighbors." [Lynch 1982:268-269]

This problem of land grabbing has not lessened in the 1990s, but becomes more acute as Filipinos migrate into Casiguran today by the thousands. A most vivid recent example was when a single incident on New Year’s Day 1994 reduced the Casiguran Agta population by another one percent. This was when a group of lowlander men ambushed an Agta family of five at Dibet, Casiguran. The Agta mother and father (Marning Bunaw and Bagéy Tapilyong) were stabbed to death and Nimpa, the youngest of their three children, was wounded in the abdomen. The three orphaned children (ages 3, 7, and 9) were taken to town where they have been permanently "adopted" into non-Agta households. The police report and the Aurora provincial newspaper (Dawn 1994) state that the two murdered Agta "sustained multiple wounds all over their bodies," and that the Agta were killed because they would not give up their claim to their land. The newspaper published the name of one of the alleged killers, a local Bikolano homesteader, but as of April 1994 he had not been arrested.

The Two Government-Designated Agta Land Reserves 

Two political decisions in favor of the Casiguran Agta were achieved in the 1930s. In 1934 the 1.53 square-kilometer Calabgan reservation established by Turnbull twenty years earlier and cleared and cultivated by Agta at that time (Worcester 1913b; Lukban 1914; Whitney 1914; Government Printing Office 1916; Sanvictores 1923) was formally declared "for the exclusive use of the [Agta] non-Christians" by Governor General Proclamation No. 723. This document (Governor General 1935:955-57) was signed and sealed by Governor General Frank Murphy on August 21, 1934. It defines in detail the exact borders of the reservation.

In 1939, another large area of land in Casiguran was set aside for the Agta, at Kasapsapan Bay (20 kilometers northwest of the Calabgan reserve). This area, comprising 62.69 hectares, was formally reserved for the exclusive use of the non-Christian Agta by Presidential Proclamation No. 467, signed by Philippine President Manuel L. Quezon on October 9, 1939 (Quezon 1939:748-49).

The Kasapsapan Bay reserve has, unfortunately, been taken over by Filipino immigrants, and no Agta have lived on that land since 1975. The larger Calabgan reserve had a more complicated history. It is today exceedingly valuable land because it consists of very productive wet rice fields irrigated by natural springs. This is the same land that the Agta, under Turnbull, cleared and made into rice fields during the second and third decades of this century. The first dispute we observed over this land occurred in 1963 between Agta and farmers. That was the year Mr. Macaraya, a government agent of the (now defunct) Commission on National Integration (CNI) came to Casiguran and undertook serious efforts to evict the non-Agta farmers from the reservation and replace them with Agta. This program was a dismal failure. He and the Agta simply lacked the power to force the squatters to move.

Then, in 1975, a major project was again attempted to establish the Agta on this reserve. Armed soldiers of the 55th Philippine Constabulary Battalion, in cooperation with agents from the government’s Panamin office, forcibly moved the many farmers off this land. (They literally sawed through their houseposts with chain saws and dragged their houses off the reservation with logging trucks.) They then moved a reported fifty Agta families into the area in order to farm the land. The optimism of the military and the Panamin agency, and some of the Agta, was high. Things went well for about a year and a half. Under supervision, the Agta built a "model village," complete with streets and houses in rows, and began energetically cultivating the fields cleared by their grandparents many years before.

However, by 1977 social relationships had badly deteriorated between the Agta and the Panamin agent, who by this time had a notorious reputation.13 Only 22 families still remained on the Calabgan reserve in July 1977, most of the rest having left because of conflicts with the agent. Then the soldiers who had been guarding the reserve to keep out squatters were transferred from Casiguran. It didn’t take long for the farmers to return. By March 1978 the Agta still on the reserve were down to seven families, plus eight non-Agta men who had gained access to the reservation land either because they were married to Agta women or had a part-Agta ancestry themselves (i.e., one Agta grandparent). In 1982 it was down to four families. The final blow came for this top-down development project on March 28, 1984, when the brother of the Panamin agent killed an Agta man named Kopes (a pseudonym) and proceeded to threaten several others, causing them to flee from the reserve. In July of 1984 there was only one Agta family still living there (an old widow and her two daughters).

Endnotes 

[The endnote numbers here correspond to the original published article, and are thus not in exact numerical order here below. ]

5. We have three lists of names of alleged victims, elicited from these three informants in separate interview sessions. The total number of names comes to 36, but only 23 of them appear in all three lists. We are less sure of the 13 names of victims that only one man claimed to know. All three stated they could not remember the names of several children killed. [ back ]

6. This incident was related to us by several Agta, the vice-mayor of Casiguran, the Chief of Police, and a military officer. We also were allowed to read, but were not given a copy of, two typed military reports of the incident. The military version was that the Agta man, Tamolan (a pseudonym), was wanted for murder, and was shot for attempting to flee when approached. The typed reports did not mention that a woman and children were also gunned down. Local civilians’ version of the incident, as they related it to us, was that the military was after Tamolan for allegedly stealing a canvas tent. A more detailed report of this incident, with names of the soldiers and victims, was sent to Amnesty International in September 1986.[ back ]

8. The two girls had to sign sworn affidavits typed up by the military before they could be released to us, copies of which we have in our possession. Typed in English, which the girls would not understand, they say, in part, "[I swear] that during my interrogation/detention, I was fairly treated and that I have no complaint whatsoever against [the military]; . . . that I will not disclose anything that transpired during my interrogation/detention at Hq ----- [name of military base] to the mass media unless cleared by military authorities." [ back ]

9. The names of the six who died were: Angela Cabaldo, Domi Padre, Gutok Padre, Pelipe Pasis, Bakas More, Junior, and an unnamed boy whose father’s name is Esing. The two men with the damaged throats are Pelip Caronan and Ben Caronan. [ back ]

13. The Agta’s main complaints of the agent were her withholding of government rations and medicine, forcing Agta to give her a third-share of the crops they harvested in their fields ("for the government," they were told), and her habit of transferring people from one plot to another just before their rice crop was ready for harvest and then keeping the crop for herself. In 1983 the Agta went as a body to the local military major requesting that this agent not be put in an authority position over them. With the major's assistance, they wrote a formal petition against the agent, dated April 2, 1983, and signed by 21 Agta family heads. Witnesses’ signatures on the document are P.C. Major Panfilo E. Ovejas and P.C. Corporal Hernando C. Castillo. We had no part in this endeavor, nor were either of us present for this meeting. [ back ]

[The full text of this article is published in Human Organization (volume 56, pp. 79-90), 1997.]