What probably could be the greatest act pulled by Gina Lopez was in convincing the world she was one honest environmental crusader.
Even President Rodrigo Duterte was somehow convinced about the image she was trying to project when he appointed her as secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. For this, she was eventually rejected by the Commission on Appointments.
My first encounter with Lopez was about seven years ago when she guested in a fiesta celebration in Looc in Romblon to personally campaign against mining. Being a Lopez gracing a small-town fiesta, she imemediately enjoyed a cult following in that part of the country who echoed her calls for a strictly no-mining operation in their once-sleepy village.
Even then, I already had some reservations about her real agenda. She was a staunch advocate against any form of mining operation, and yet she was ferried by a chopper powered by fossil fuel mined form several hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. She was adorned by sparkling diamonds sourced from mine pits thousands of miles from the country. She was in constant communication with her peers outside of that small island from Romblon courtesy of the latest model of a mobile phone that time, the parts of which are products of different mine sites.
What a way to call for a total ban on mining. Her acts after that betrayed her environmental masquerade.
In 2012, in a news forum in a restaurant in Quezon City, she openly defended former President Noynoy Aquino who was then being accused by indigenous people of selling their future to investors on the issue of mining even as his records speak otherwise.
“Please don’t say I said President Aquino is also grossly irresponsible over the mining industry,” I remember Lopez telling me when I asked her then over Aquino’s responsibility on the indigenous people’s concern.
Aquino, that time, was accused by the Kalipunan ng mga Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas of taking the side of foreign investors with regard to the mining industry.
Aquino’s record to protect the country’s mining industry has been proven dismal.
Under his administration, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau has endorsed for approval a total of 530 applications covering about five million hectares of prospective mineral lands.
In 2011, a high-profile delegation from the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines, accompanied Aquino to China to seal up to $3 billion in mining investments and mineral-supply contracts with Chinese firms during his state visit to China next week.
I am just not sure whether those granted by Aquino mining permits were among those ordered closed by Lopez during her short stint as Environment and Natural Resources Secretary.
In 2013, when Gina was busy touring the country for her environmental crusade, she opted to keep her silence when her family’s firms got involved in some environmental disaster.
She kept mum on the Lopez-owned First Philippine Holdings which is responsible for the West Towers oil pipeline leak that has gone on for years without being investigated.
And then there is the case of the Lopez-controlled Energy Development Corp’s geothermal production field in Kananga, Leyte which figured in another disaster where at least 15 workers of the EDC and First Balfour, also a Lopez firm, who were erecting a protective structure for the steel pipes, were killed. There were heavy rains and landslides but the bodies were charred beyond recognition. To date,there has been no explanation to date on why the bodies were burned.
But more than the charred bodies, reports say that tests had shown the toxicity level of the chemical boron, which sources in the DENR then said, had already spread to a nearby river.
“The tests conducted by [DENR] showed that the toxic boron has already spread down to the river, which clearly presents a big environmental problem, if not a hazardous one to the health of the villagers,” according to a DENR source.
Where was Gina when all these were happening? She kept on harping against the negative environmental impact of mining operations in the country, but was surprisingly quiet when it comes to environmental disasters caused by her family owned companies.
And at the time Gina was at the helm of the DENR, she did not even question the environmental, sewerage and sanitation fees which were allowed to be charged to consumers of her family-owned water concessionare, Maynilad, and Manila Water from rate rebasing 2002 up to 2016 from 10 percent to 20 percent which would amount to somewhere between P32 billion and P38 billion, despite not meeting the international standards as called for in their Concession Agreement.
Up to now, Maynilad has yet to install a single meter of sewer pipe a sewerage treatment plan or initiate reforestation project in the Sierra Madre Watershed.
And now, from nowhere, Gina resurfaces, blaming this time, legitimate mining operators for the Itogon mining disaster which no less than the local government officials in that area blame on gold buyers from the black market who commissions these illegal small-scale mining operators.
Ironically, Gina could have acted to put a stop to these illegal mining operations when she was still the DENR secretary. But she did not, she was more focused on collecting millions of pesos from legitimate mining firms to fund her own NGO and maybe at the same time protect her own family’s business interest.
Gina has gone a long way from her Ananda Marga days, from the day she ran away from the rehabilitation facilities of the DARE Foundation in 1975 where she had been committed to by her mother for alleged illegal substance abuse. She can dream and act all she wants, but she cannot convince us she is a no-nonsense environmental champion.