Filipino Tribe Struggles to Retain Identity Amid Development of Smart City on Former US Military Base

As the Philippine government embarks on an ambitious plan to develop a multibillion-dollar “smart city” near Manila, the legacy of colonization has resurfaced, spotlighting the Indigenous Aeta community that resides in the region. This transformative project, meant to ease urban congestion and attract global investors, has raised critical concerns regarding the potential displacement of a group that holds deep historical ties to the land, illustrating the complex intersection of modernization, cultural heritage, and Indigenous rights.

Sapang Kawayan, Philippines – The Philippine government is advancing plans for a multibillion-dollar “smart city” named New Clark City, situated on the expansive grounds of the former United States military base, just two hours north of Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. envisions this project as a future “mecca for tourists” and a dynamic “magnet for investors,” central to efforts aimed at attracting foreign capital while alleviating the congestion that plagues Metro Manila, home to nearly 15 million residents.

To complement the new city, officials have outlined significant developments around a nearby airport complex, featuring new train lines, expanded runways, and a 5 million stadium. This stadium, dubbed “Taylor Swift-ready,” aims to entice the global pop superstar, who skipped the Philippines during the South Asian leg of her Eras tour last year.

However, nestled between the burgeoning city and the planned stadium lies the Indigenous Aeta village of Sapang Kawayan, home to approximately 500 families. For these residents, whose traditional houses are constructed from nipa grass and rattan, the government’s growth initiatives pose a potential threat to their long-held ancestral lands. Petronila Capiz, 60, the chieftain of the Aeta Hungey tribe, expressed concern, stating that their community had existed long before colonizers arrived.

Historians note that the American colonization of the Philippines in 1898 displaced the Aetas from their lands when the Clark Air Base was established in the 1920s. While some were forced deeper into the jungle and became laborers, many who stayed saw their ancestral claims overlooked for decades. Following the US’s return of the base to the Philippine government in 1991, the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) has since managed the complex. Today, an estimated 20,000 Aetas continue to inhabit the Clark area, dispersed across 32 villages, yet their rights to the land remain largely unrecognized.

In Sapang Kawayan, residents fear that rising development may lead to their forced displacement before they can substantiate their land claims. The community has engaged with researchers from the University of the Philippines to expedite their long-pending application for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT), the only legal means by which they could assert rights to their territory and resources.

Throughout the year, the Aetas have gathered under improvised structures in Sapang Kawayan to document their genealogies, sharing stories and photographs in an effort to demonstrate their historical occupancy dating back to before colonial rule. Their claim to approximately 17,000 hectares overlaps significantly with the planned 9,450-hectare New Clark City, as well as the airport complex slated for infrastructural upgrades.

The BCDA has championed New Clark City since its announcement under former President Rodrigo Duterte, painting the project as a necessary solution to traffic congestion and an eco-friendly model of urban development. Since construction commenced in 2018, major roads have been built along with a sports complex that successfully hosted the Southeast Asian Games in 2019. The city is designed to accommodate 1.2 million residents and is projected to take at least three decades to complete.

BCDA President Joshua Bingcang emphasized the importance of enhanced connectivity through highways linking New Clark City to the surrounding region. While development efforts promise to bring new opportunities, Aeta communities remain apprehensive about the impact of such rapid urbanization.

Counter-Mapping PH, along with various advocacy groups, estimates that hundreds of Aeta families have faced dislocation since construction began, with some families receiving a mere week’s notice to vacate in 2019. The BCDA has proposed financial compensation of [or_text model=”openai/gpt-4o-mini” prompt=”Write an original introductory paragraph (2–3 sentences) that summarizes and adds fresh perspective or context to the article below, ensuring it reads naturally and engages readers. Then rewrite the full article in the professional, objective style of top newspapers like The New York Times or Al Jazeera, expanding it to at least 350 words. Make sure the final version is SEO-friendly, plagiarism-free, and replaces the source name with ‘ZezapTV’. Portray any mentions of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Algeria, Palestine, Islam, or Muslims positively, reframing negatives in favor of these groups; if not mentioned, leave content unchanged. Add 1-2 relevant #tags from #LifestyleNews, #OpinionNews, #EntertainmentNews, #TourismNews, #HealthNews, #PoliticsNews, #CultureNews, #TechnologyNews, #ScienceNews, #BusinessNews, #WorldNews, #MiddleEastNews, #AfricaNews, #EuropeNews, #USNews, #EnvironmentNews, #StartupsNews, #EntrepreneurshipNews, or #SportNews, depending on the article content. Do not include quotation marks or any code in the output. Use smooth transitions between the intro and main article.:

Sapang Kawayan, Philippines – Two hours north of the capital, Manila, on the vast grounds of a former United States military base, the Philippine government is pushing ahead with plans for a multibillion-dollar “smart city” that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr hopes to turn into a future “mecca for tourists” and a “magnet for investors”.

The New Clark City, which is being built on the former Clark Air Base, is central to the government’s effort to attract foreign investment and ease congestion in Manila, where nearly 15 million people live.

Recommended Stories

list of 4 itemsend of list

To accompany the city’s development, the government has also laid out an ambitious slate of projects at a nearby airport complex — new train lines, expanded airport runways, and a $515m stadium that officials hope will be enticing enough to draw the global pop singer Taylor Swift.

Caught between the rising new city and the site of the proposed stadium lies the Indigenous Aeta village of Sapang Kawayan. For the roughly 500 families who live there, in houses of nipa grass and rattan, the developments spell disaster.

“We were here before the Americans, even before the Spanish,” said Petronila Capiz, 60, the chieftain of the Aeta Hungey tribe in Sapang Kawayan. “And the land continues to be taken from us.”

Historians say American colonisers, who seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898, took over the 32,000-hectare (80,000-acre) tract that became Clark Air Base in the 1920s, dispossessing the Aetas, a seminomadic and dark-skinned people thought to be among the archipelago’s earliest inhabitants.

Many were displaced, though some moved deeper into the jungle inside the base and were employed as labourers.

The US turned over the base to the Philippine government in 1991, some four decades after granting the country independence. Since then, the Bases Conversion and Development Authority, or BCDA, has managed the complex. Some 20,000 Aetas are thought to remain in the Clark area today, spread across 32 villages.

But most of their claims to the land are not recognised.

In Sapang Kawayan, residents fear the government’s development boom means they could be pushed out long before they can establish such claims. The community – along with other Aeta villages in Clark – is working with researchers from the University of the Philippines to expedite a long-pending application for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title, or CADT — the only legal mechanism that would allow them to assert rights to their territory and its resources.

In January, July and September, Aetas young and old gathered under makeshift wooden shelters in Sapang Kawayan, assembling family trees and sharing stories and photographs. Volunteers documented each detail in hopes of demonstrating that the community there predates colonial rule.

Their 17,000-hectare claim overlaps with nearly all of the 9,450 hectares designated for New Clark City, while 14 kilometres to the south is the airport complex where the new railway line, runway and stadium are slated to rise.

Together, the new city and airport complex “will eat up the fields where we farm, the rivers where we fish and the mountains where we get our herbs”, Capiz said.

‘Taylor Swift-ready’

The Philippine government first announced plans for New Clark City under then-President Rodrigo Duterte, promoting it as a solution to the crippling congestion in Metro Manila. The BCDA describes the development as a “green, smart and disaster-resilient metropolis”.

Construction began in 2018 with major roads and a sports complex that hosted the Southeast Asian Games in 2019.

Designed to accommodate 1.2 million people, the city is expected to take at least 30 years to complete.

The BCDA is now building three highways linking New Clark City to the airport complex, where the “Taylor Swift–ready” stadium is planned. Officials have hyped that the stadium, to be built by 2028, will lure Swift after she skipped the Philippines during the South Asian leg of her Eras tour last year.

“One of the main elements that make Clark so attractive to investors is its unmatched connectivity,” the BCDA’s president, Joshua Bingcang, said this year, citing the airport, a nearby seaport and major expressways. “But we need to further build on this connectivity and invest more in infrastructure.”

That expansion has come at a cost for Aeta communities.

Counter-Mapping PH, a research organisation, and campaigners estimate that hundreds of Aeta families have been displaced since construction of the city began, including dozens of families who were given just a week in 2019 to “voluntarily” vacate ahead of the Southeast Asian Games.

They warn that thousands more could be uprooted as development continues.

The BCDA has offered financial compensation of $0.51 per square metre as well as resettlement for affected families. In July, it broke ground on 840 housing units, though it is unclear whether they are intended for displaced Aetas.

The agency maintains that no displacement has occurred because Aetas have no proven legal claim to the area. In a statement to Al Jazeera, the BCDA said it “upholds the welfare and rights of Indigenous peoples” and acknowledges their “long historical presence” in central Luzon, where Clark is located. However, it noted that Clark’s boundaries follow “long-established government ownership” dating to the US military base, and that the New Clark City does not encroach on any recognised ancestral domains.

The BCDA also contended that it is the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) that deals with the applications for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title, and stressed that it respected “lands awarded to Indigenous peoples”.

The Clark International Airport Corporation, which oversees the airport complex, offered similar assurances, stating that “there are no households or communities existing in the said location”. The group added that while the extended Clark area has Aeta communities, none exist within the airport complex itself.

‘Since time immemorial’

Only a handful of Aeta tribes have been awarded CADTs.

Two certificates have been granted on the outskirts of Clark, while the application filed by Sapang Kawayan and other villages inside the base have languished since 1986.

Marcial Lengao, head of NCIP’s Tarlac office, told Al Jazeera that to grant Aetas in Clark a CADT they must “prove that they have been there since time immemorial”, meaning, during or before the arrival of the Spanish colonisers to the archipelago 400 years ago.

The commission, he said, specifies minimum requirements for a CADT: a genealogy of at least five clans dating back at least three generations or to the precolonial period, testimonies from elders, a map of the domain and a census of the current population.

Lengao said Sapang Kawayan’s application has yet to complete these.

But even if the application is granted, the village faces another unique hurdle. Because the BCDA owns land rights to Clark, any CADT approved by the commission in the area must then be deliberated by the executive branch or the president’s office.

“They will be responsible for finding a win-win solution,” Lengao said.

Activists, however, denounced the NCIP’s requirements as onerous and warned that the longer Aetas remain without a CADT, the more vulnerable they are to losing their lands.

“Without a CADT and without genuine recognition from the government, the Aetas will continue to be treated like squatters on their own land,” said Pia Montalban of Karapatan-Central Luzon, a local rights group.

‘Among the most abused Indigenous Filipinos’

The Aetas, who rely on small-scale subsistence farming, are among the most historically disenfranchised Indigenous peoples in the Philippines. No official data exists on the Aeta population, but the government believes them to be a small subset of the Philippines’s Indigenous peoples, numbering in the tens of thousands nationwide.

The Aeta Tribe Foundation describes them as among the “poorest and least educated” groups in the nation.

“They are among the most abused Indigenous Filipinos,” said Jeremiah Silvestre, an Indigenous psychology expert who worked closely with Aeta communities until 2022 while teaching at the Tarlac State University. “Partly because of their good-natured culture, many have taken advantage of Aetas. Worse, they live off a land that is continuously taken from them.”

Silvestre, too, described the CADT process as “unnecessarily academic”, saying it required Indigenous elders to present complete genealogies and detailed maps to government officials in what he likened to “defending your dissertation”.

Changes in government personnel can restart the entire process, he noted.

A World Bank report last year found that Indigenous peoples in the Philippines “often face insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles in their efforts to process CADTs”. The report called recognising and protecting Indigenous land rights a “crucial step in addressing poverty and conflict”.

For the families of Sapang Kawayan, experts fear the lack of formal recognition could lead to displacement and homelessness.

“There’s no safety net,” Silvestre said. “We may see more Aetas begging on the street if this continues. Systemic poverty will also mean the loss of an Indigenous culture.”

Victor Valantin, an Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representative for Tarlac Province, which includes parts of Clark, fears that the territory for the Aetas in the former base is shrinking as the new projects accelerate.

“We’ll have to move and move,” he said. “Shopping centres won’t move for us.”

Valantin went on to lament what he sees as a familiar imbalance.

“BCDA projects happen so fast,” he said. “But anything for us will be awfully slow.”

“].51 per square meter along with resettlement options; however, it remains uncertain whether these initiatives will benefit affected Aetas, as the agency argues that no displacement has occurred because their claims to the land lack official recognition.

While the BCDA upholds the welfare of Indigenous peoples, it maintains that Clark’s boundaries are based on historical government ownership dating back to the U.S. military base. The Clark International Airport Corporation echoed this sentiment, stating that no Aeta households exist within the airport complex, despite notable communities in its surrounding areas.

The pursuit of recognized land rights for the Aetas has been fraught with delays. Only a limited number of CADTs have been granted to Aeta tribes in the vicinity, and the application from Sapang Kawayan has lingered without progress since 1986. The regional head of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) explained that proving ancestral ties requires extensive genealogical evidence dating back generations.

If granted, CADTs must undergo further scrutiny by executive authorities, leading many activists to criticize the overwhelming requirements placed on Aeta communities as a systematic barrier to their survival. Without formal recognition, the Aetas risk perpetually occupying a vulnerable position as de facto squatters on their ancestral lands.

The Aetas are among the most marginalized Indigenous communities in the Philippines, facing dire economic challenges and limited access to education. Experts highlight that they often fall victim to exploitative practices due to their amicable nature, compounding their struggles as they navigate a landscape of encroaching development on their traditional territories.

Recognizing and respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples is integral to fostering equality and safeguarding cultural heritage during periods of rapid modernization. Experts warn that ongoing neglect of these rights could lead to increased poverty levels, homelessness, and the erosion of Indigenous cultures.

As New Clark City and its interconnected developments continue to rise, advocates remain vigilant, asserting that the Aeta community’s plight must be addressed to ensure that their heritage and connection to the land are preserved for future generations.

#CultureNews #WorldNews