Boracay’s first people are still being told to wait

A presidential signature on a land title ought to mean something. In Boracay, eight years later, it means the Ati still have to argue with armed guards at a gate.

The Boracay Ati Tribal Organization filed three cases on April 29 against JECO Development Corporation, which had barricaded a portion of land covered by a Certificate of Land Ownership Award issued in 2018. The CLOA was part of the rehabilitation push under the previous administration, when Boracay was closed for six months and recast as a story of environmental and social correction. The Ati, recognized as the island’s original inhabitants, were supposed to be among the people that closure made whole.

Eight years on, they are still asking to go home.

We keep returning to what BATO chieftain Delsa Justo said: “We are not asking for anything new. We are asking only to go home.” That is not a legal argument. It is a sentence that should embarrass anyone who still describes Boracay’s recovery as finished.

The legal mess is real, and it matters. Lawyer Romy Paolo Lucion, who is representing BATO, has been careful to draw a line between the agrarian case pending before the Department of Agrarian Reform — which affirmed a cancellation order favoring JECO and other developers in 2024 — and the question now in front of the Kalibo trial court and the provincial prosecutor. His point is hard to argue with. A registered owner does not get removed by armed guards in February while a motion for reconsideration is sitting on a desk. You go to court. JECO, he said, “came to the land” instead.

This is the gap our system keeps producing. While DAR processes drag on, the physical facts on the ground get rewritten by whoever can afford a fence and a uniformed crew. Courts can issue status quo orders in cases like this, and in this one, they should — fast — so the people with the title in their hands are not the ones locked out while lawyers argue.

The bigger problem is the one Boracay has never honestly faced. The island earned PHP 56.86 billion in tourism receipts in 2024, according to the Department of Tourism’s regional data — a record year, celebrated in press releases. The Ati community is fighting for a sliver of that same island. The math of who benefits from paradise, and who waits at its edge, has not really changed since the 1990s.

Sustainable tourism cannot only mean cleaner water and capped arrivals. If the original residents of a destination are still negotiating their way past a security guard to reach land already awarded to them, the rehabilitation was partial at best.

The fix is not complicated, even if it is uncomfortable. Enforce the title until a final ruling says otherwise. Move the DAR review along. And stop pretending Boracay’s story is one of redemption while its first people are still standing outside the gate.