Manuel Elizalde, 60, Dies; Defender of Primitive Tribe
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
Published: May 8, 1997
Manuel Elizalde Jr., a wealthy Filipino official who caused a sensation in 1971 when he announced that he had discovered a tiny tribe of people who had lived for thousands of years in such blissful Stone Age isolation that they had no word for war, died on Saturday at his home in Makati, a Manila suburb. He was 60, and some scientists say he was one of the world's master hoaxers.
To the wave of anthropologists, archaeologists and others who descended on Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, in the early 1970's, the 24 people Mr. Elizalde said he had found there in June 1971 seemed too good to be true.
Calling themselves Tasadays, after their sacred mountain, they were hunter-gatherers who never ventured far from their cave dwellings, had no notion of agriculture, went around naked or in leaves, lived in perfect harmony and said they had assumed they were the only people in the world, even though a population of farming people lived only a three-hour walk through the dense jungle.
There were those who were suspicious from the beginning. For one thing, Mr. Elizalde was something of an iconoclast. A Harvard-educated scion of one of the Philippines' wealthiest families, he had given up his hard-drinking playboy ways to champion the nation's beleaguered minorities, first as a private citizen and later as a member of President Ferdinand E. Marcos's Cabinet.
Mr. Elizalde affected such an interest in primitive youth that he and his wife adopted 50 children from minority groups.
Still, the initial wave of social scientists who visited the Tasadays were convinced they were who they and Mr. Elizalde said they were. Their enthusiastic reports led to a book, ''The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest,'' by John Nance; glowing accounts in The National Geographic, and extensive television coverage.
Expressing fear that the Tasadays' habitat would be destroyed by the encroachments of civilization, the Marcos Government created a 46,000-acre preserve for them and put it off limits to loggers and farmers.
Skeptics were dismayed in 1974 when Mr. Elizalde, citing a need to protect the Tasadays from exploitation and the harmful effects of too much contact with civilization, blocked any further visits by social scientists.
The area remained off limits until after Marcos was deposed in 1986. Then, as outsiders again made their way to the Tasaday preserve, doubts about them became rampant.
Some anthropologists had called their story implausible from the beginning. Among other things, they pointed out, their caves lacked the middens, or trash heaps, that would have been expected of peoples living there for centuries.
It did not help when members of a neighboring tribe said Mr. Elizalde had paid them to take off their clothes and pose as Tasadays for visiting journalists and others.
Mr. Elizalde, who had been forced to leave the Philippines in 1983 after a falling out with Imelda Marcos, the President's wife, settled on a coffee plantation in Costa Rica with more than a dozen young Filipino girls. It did not add to his reputation when the Costa Rica Government expelled him in 1986, citing scandalous reports of what went on inside his heavily guarded compound.
He returned to the Philippines in 1988, helped manage his family's extensive business interests and tried unsuccessfully to rekindle his political career. A 1993 nomination to be Ambassador to Mexico was withdrawn after it created a political furor over Mr. Elizalde's ties to the Marcos administration and his role in what was then widely perceived as the Tasaday hoax.
Since 1971 the Tasadays have virtually merged into neighboring groups and picked up so many trappings of modern civilization that they can no longer be studied as unique primitives.
But the debate over their origins still rages. For all the questions of plausibility and the reports that they were paid to fake the degree of their primitive status, some social scientists still believe they had lived for a few centuries in complete isolation.
It was a reflection of their rapid acculturalization that in 1988, several members of the tribe filed a libel suit against anthropologists who had called them fakers.
''We are the forest,'' one of the women said before affixing her thumbprint to the complaint. ''We are the Tasaday. We are as real as the forest and the flowers and the trees and the stream.''
It was an eloquent declaration, and one that would undoubtedly have been given more credence if it had not been made at Mr. Elizalde's Manila mansion by an interpreter he supplied.
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