The most prominently documented instances of Indigenous people’s resistance against the Marcos administration’s appropriation of indigenous lands involve cases where indigenous land rights were threatened by dam construction projects, The project was shelved in the 1980s after public outrage in the wake of the murder of opposition leader
Macli-ing Dulag. It is now considered a landmark
case study concerning
ancestral domain issues in the Philippines. Even if only part of the project pushed through, the project's watershed would have encompassed the municipalities of
Tinglayan,
Lubuagan,
Pasil, and parts of
Tabuk in
Kalinga Province, and the municipalities of
Sabangan,
Sagada,
Sadanga,
Bontoc,
Bauko, and parts of
Barlig in
Mountain Province. Contemporary estimates suggest that the project would have displaced about 100,000 Kalingas and Bontoks. In Kalinga, the barrios of Ableg, Cagaluan, Dupag, Tanglag, Dognac, and Mabongtot would be completely submerged. The
Kalinga-Apayao government estimated that more than 1,000 families would be rendered homeless as a result, and P31,500,000 worth of farmlands would be lost. An additional P38,250,000 worth of rice fields farmed by the residents of Bangad, Lubuagan, Dangtalan, Guinaang, and Naneng would also be flooded, even if the villages themselves would not be submerged. In 1977, numerous opposition leaders—including tribal leaders Lumbaya Aliga Gayudan, Macli-ing Dulag,—opened fire on Dulag at his home, killing him instantly. Macli-ing Dulag's murder became a turning point in the history of Martial Law, because for the first time since the press crackdown during the declaration of Martial Law in 1972, the mainstream Philippine press confronted the issue of the military's arrests of civilians under Martial Law. Macli-ing's murder unified the various peoples of the
Cordillera Mountains against the proposed dam, causing both the World Bank and the Marcos regime to eventually abandon the project a few years after.
Resistance to the Kaliwa River Dam Manila Water Supply III project of the Marcos administration, sometimes referred to as the first “Laiban Dam” project, was the first of numerous proposed dams in the Kaliwa River watershed. In November 1979, the
Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) was tasked to look for potential dam sites, and identified the Kaliwa River basin to be the most viable alternative. Thus in the same year, the first World Bank feasibility study on the damming of the Kaliwa river began. The Indigenous peoples who lived in the watershed, including the
Remontado Agta who were most affected, opposed the dam. They first appealed to the Marcos administration to stop the construction. But when Marcos refused, they “responded with intense social mobilization over many years,” with tactics including protests, road blockades, and other approaches. Eventually, the Philippine economy went into rapid decline because Marcos' debt driven deficit spending made the Philippines vulnerable when the United States increased its interest rates in the third quarter of 1981. The ensuing
collapse of the Philippine economy, worsened by the political pressure after the
assassination of Benigno Aquino, led to slow development of the Laiban dam project until Marcos was forced out of office and into exile by the
1986 People Power Revolution. == Rise of the Moro conflict ==