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.
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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.”