BAGUIO CITY – Alarmed indigenous peoples (IP) leaders here slammed the Coheco Badeo Corporation that is planning to put up an ambitious 500-megawatt pump storage hydro power plant in barangay Badeo for allegedly employing harassment and bribery tactics to force oppositors to its water rights application pending before the National Water Resources board (NWRB) to withdraw their petition in exchange for regular allowances and other benefits for their families among others.
Joseph Onero, an IP leader in barangay Badeo, said a barangay official had been allegedly convincing those who signed the petition against Coheco Badeo Corporation’s water rights application to visit the company’s office in Sagpat junction for them to allegedly receive their regular allowances in exchange for their signing the withdrawal of their petition against the company’s water rights application.
Worst, Onero claimed that while in the said office, the oppositors were allegedly interrogated as if they had committed a grave offense when in fact, their petition opposing the company’s water rights application was to protect their main source of water for the present and future generations of IPs in the municipality.
“We vehemently denounce the alleged harassment and bribery being employed by Coheco Badeo Corporation in trying to cut short the process of the conduct of hearings for our opposition to the company’s water rights application. It seems the company is trying to rush things so that they could already secure the free and prior informed consent of the people for them to be able to sell their consent at the expense of the IPs and eventually earn billions of pesos without giving something in return for the IPs that may or may not give their consent for the project,” Onero stressed.
The IP leader also criticized Coheco Badeo Corporation for employing mind conditioning to the IPs in the different barangays of the municipality as its officers had already been going around the town conducting purported information education activities even without the order from the Cordillera office of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP_CAR) for it to proceed with the formal free and prior informed consent process.
Some IP leaders in the barangays where the company conducted its purported IEC activities claimed that some of its officers had allegedly resorted to character assassination of other officers of another hydro company while others had tried to discredit the opposition to the project.
From the start, Coheco Badeo Corporation tried to deceive the IPs in the municipality when it tried to bring to barangay Badeo units of drilling equipment to conduct drilling activities even without the authority from concerned government agencies, thus, concerned IP leaders brought the matter to the attention of the NCIP which subsequently issued the cease and desist order for the company to strictly follow the stringent rules in the pursuit of the ambitious project.
He appealed to the IPs in the Kibungan ancestral domain not to be carried away by the sugar-coated words of the Coheco Badeo Corporation officials and their harassment and bribery efforts because it will be the IPs that will be at a loss once the project will push through considering its heavy impact to the state of the environment in their place.
By HENT
