The Sicogon dream that never was

It’s a hell of an image – an armed 60-year-old heir barricaded inside a luxury resort, cursing out corporate executives on video while the local police wait outside.

What happened at the Huni resort on Sicogon Island last week was the messy, inevitable collapse of a billion-peso tourism dream that simply forgot the people it was supposed to lift up.

For 16 years, the joint venture between the Sarrosa-Marañon family’s SIDECO and Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) was billed as the crown jewel of northern Iloilo. Following the devastation of Super Typhoon Yolanda, the development was sold to the public as a masterclass in inclusive growth. We all know how that turned out. The island’s airport quietly shut down late last year. By June 15, both Huni Hotel and Balay Kogon had permanently locked their doors.

This is what happens when corporate tourism models fail. A Manila-drafted blueprint does not survive long on the ground without genuine local roots. You cannot just parachute a luxury master plan onto an island without completely resolving the dirt-level issues of who owns what and how the locals will eat.

Dave Sarrosa’s frustration is not exactly a mystery. When you look at the stagnation and the hungry families, the anger makes sense. But bullets do not build resorts. Storming the very property your family holds a stake in, firing shots, and leaving 11 ordinary SITEC employees terrified for their lives crosses a massive line. Vigilantism, no matter how righteous it feels in the moment, instantly delegitimizes the real fight for land rights. It just hands the legal high ground right back to the developers.

The bitter irony here is the timing. Just days before Sarrosa’s armed takeover, ALI finally moved. They transferred 63 hectares of land – 30 for residential, 33 for agriculture – and released a PHP 29,000,000 housing fund to the local farmers’ federation, FESIFFA.

You really have to ask why it took a decade and a half, the total collapse of resort operations, and a boiling point to force these concessions. Corporate timelines are notoriously slow. But when you are dealing with displaced families and stripped livelihoods, a delay of that magnitude is practically an insult. The concessions came too late to save the island’s economy from flatlining, and obviously too late to stop the violence.

At the end of the day, the people paying the highest price are not the executives in Makati or the elites trading insults online. It’s the ordinary Sicogon residents. Look at the four locals arrested alongside Sarrosa. They were not his private security detail; they were just guys from the island who tagged along. Now they are the ones sitting in a holding cell facing serious criminal charges, while the principal investors will likely just hire better lawyers.

We cannot keep doing development this way. If there’s a solution here, it starts with the government stepping in to aggressively mediate the unwinding of this mess, securing the locals’ land titles first before any new investor even thinks of stepping foot on the sand. We need investments in Western Visayas, absolutely. But we don’t need joint ventures that treat the community as an afterthought – or worse, collateral damage in a boardroom war.