The disaster at Manila’s Payatas dump was another grim episode in a city teeming with misery. But some people blame the catastrophe not on tragic happenstance but government negligence. “Payatas should not have happened at all,” says Fulgencio Factoran, a former Environment and Natural Resources secretary for the Philippines. “The dump was unsupervised. There was an absolute lack of political will in keeping people away from the area.” Local government officials had made desultory efforts to relocate the squatters, but the sites were too far from places where they could eek out a living, and so the Payatas “residents” refused to leave.
Critics say that President Joseph Estrada, like others before him, has been slow to tackle core problems that contributed to the disaster–including Manila’s trash problem and the abject poverty that grips about 10 percent of the capital’s 11 million people. The poor, who voted him into office, feel abandoned. Manila churns out much more garbage than it can handle, in part because it has no modern waste-treatment facilities, no systemic recycling effort and lax regulation of its landfills. The Payatas dump is 27 years old and far too big to be safe. And yet nearly 80,000 people live adjacent to it–desperately poor scavengers who trek up the trash mountain every day to forage for bottles and plastic containers to sell to junk shops. Shantytowns along the 22-hectare dump have become vote-rich communities for ambitious local politicians, who haven’t worried much about the squalor or dangerous towers of garbage looming overhead.
Despite generating 10,000 tons of trash every day, Manila has only two landfills. Payatas is one, and the other is located in the nearby province of Rizal. As the dumps have grown, they’ve attracted increasing numbers of people. “Where should a city put its homeless?” asked an editorial in the CyberDyaryo, an online Filipino newspaper, last week. “Many millions live in danger zones–on sea walls, along filthy canals, under bridges, along railroad tracks… Until the mountain of trash came crashing [down], nobody bothered to ask: why do people live in a garbage dump?”
Estrada has promised a safer waste-disposal system for Manila, and lawmakers are now reviewing the country’s landfill laws. Last week the government announced that Payatas would be closed; a new landfill will be started by January. “We don’t want to live here any longer,” says Delia Garin, a 60-year-old scavenger who’s been living in the Promised Land for nine years. Her shack was destroyed, but Garin and her family survived. Local officials are talking again of relocating the squatters. But for the victims of the dump disaster and their relatives, it is way too late. To them, Manila’s Promised Land will always be hell on earth.
