My wife comes from Surigao del Sur guess about a 2 hour drive north of Mt Diwalwal , in that area there are a bunch of rebel freedom fighters , the roads have sandbags with machine guns behind them , you can hear the Govt artillery shelling at night , I asked my brother in law do you always get thunder at night his response , "no thats the artillery "
Its an interesting area not really that Muslim , the other side of the Island and further South is though , however still this area is pretty lawless , they still have witch doctors, I have seen corpses at my wife's family cemetery being eaten by dogs after grave robbers broke into the tombs , the American lumber companies (Georgia Pacific ) were closed down by the locals many years ago , and now the locals harvest the trees but can not afford the loaders to load them on the trucks , amusing to watch them load the trees with ropes and about 30 locals .
The locals really have shot themselves in the foot by getting rid of international companies who helped with schooling and social services .
Local police chief got murdered a few years back for questioning if the loggers had logging rights .
There is a lot of rudimentary mining of gold , they use mercury to lock the gold together , and many of the workers are sick from the mercury . Be interesting to see how MRD plan to evict the current miners - there are thousands of them .
RED5 had a mine further North on the Island (Surigao del Nor ) - got closed down due to tailing wall collapse and the govt would not allow them to reopen .
It really is a *ed up place guess the gold potential must be worth it according to MRD
MRD Price at posting:
1.1¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
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