AS we write this comment, more than a hundred families in sitio Panganason, Barangay Kingking, Pantukan in Compostela Valley Province were still picking up the broken pieces of their lives disrupted by the Good Friday landslide wherein 13 people perished and several others given up for dead. This is not counting those who were hospitalized.
Worldwide publicity on the killer landslide prompted the Aquino government, still smarting from the sliding approval rating of the President, to spring into action. Within hours, the tragedy site was crawling with government functionaries, including three department secretaries.
As a result, government declared the small-scale mining site a “no habitation zone” and effected a forcible evacuation, even as retrieval operations continued.
The Cabinet men who went to the site were the secretaries of Environment and Natural Resources, Defense, and Interior and Local Government. But the issues involved in the tragedy do not only concern the DILG, DND and DENR.
What are the learnings in that April 22 tragedy? Let’s look at these facts:
Three years ago, the Provincial Mining Regulatory Board of Compostela Valley, recommended that the area be identified officially as a small-scale mining site so that it could be regulated. A memorandum of agreement (MOA) among the local government, other government agencies and small-scale miners was signed some portions could be declared no habitation zones.
Aside from endangering their lives, the small-scale miners also endanger the lives of other people and the environment by continuously using mercury, cyanide and dynamites in their operations.
It was also discovered that some of those who were killed in the avalanche were minors, indicating that small-scale miners were exploiting child labor. The child laborers were not even studying in schools.
How the dynamites, mercury and cyanide found their way into the hands of miners when they are supposed to be banned shows the failure of the Department of Health and the Bureau of Customs to do their job. Unchecked child exploitation in the mining site is another failure of government, this time of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). So you see the Pantukan accident can not only be blamed on the municipal and provincial governments, the DILG, the DND, and the DENR. It is a wholesale failure of the Aquino government to do its job of enforcing laws for lack of political will. That is the kindest thing we can say about the Good Friday tragedy.
