The DAR’s order wasn’t final. The padlock didn’t care.

Nobody told the Boracay Ati that their garden was gone. Their gardener found out first — showed up one morning, couldn’t get in, went back to tell the others. That’s how Maria Tamboon and her community learned, on Feb. 16, that Jeco Development Corp. had padlocked a portion of their land at Station 3 overnight. No notice to vacate. No writ of execution. Just a tarpaulin with a copy of a DAR order that, as of that morning, hadn’t even become final.

This is worth sitting with for a moment. The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) has a process. So does the legal system. A motion for reconsideration was filed by ABATO’s counsel on Feb. 4 and received by the DAR on Feb. 9 — well within the reglementary period. The order was not final. And yet there was a sturdy door, locked, with security guards reportedly hiding their nameplates when confronted. Tamboon put it plainly: “Who serves [the finality] should be the DAR. It should be the DAR — not the security guard.”

She is right. And the fact that this needs to be said at all is part of the problem.

This is not the first time the Ati have been pushed out before the courts are done. In March 2024, galvanized iron sheets went up on a different parcel — also on a Sunday, also while the case was supposedly still active. The same pattern: a private party moves first, and the community scrambles to document, file blotters, call lawyers, reach out to nuns for assistance. It is exhausting in a way that is clearly deliberate.

The Ati received their CLOAs in 2018 as part of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s rehabilitation program for Boracay — roughly 3.1 hectares total, less than one percent of the island. Six developers immediately filed protests. The DAR, rather than defending what it had issued, has spent the years since systematically unraveling those titles. Two cancellations already. A relocation offer to Antique province that the Ati rejected — reasonably so, given that their livelihoods, their social ties, everything they know is on that island.

The CLOA 5 land in question is not abstract real estate. It’s where Ati families grow bananas, cassava, papaya, coconuts. Each harvest earns them PHP 500 to PHP 1,000 per sale — not a fortune, but it is theirs, and it is what gets them through the week. Non-Ati workers passing through the same property are reportedly let in without issue. Tamboon noted that too: “There’s some discrimination against us there.”

What needs to happen now is straightforward, even if the politics are not. DAR must formally acknowledge the pending motion for reconsideration and suspend any enforcement activity until the case is resolved. The Commission on Human Rights, which has been urged to investigate by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, should move. And the Malay local government cannot keep treating this as someone else’s problem.

Boracay earns the country billions. The Ati were there before any of it. The least they deserve is a locked door that actually follows the law.