By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The truck ban now being seriously implemented in Baguio City has eased traffic a great deal. At least during rush hours when it is in effect. But what took us too long to adopt this measure? It had been staring us in the face and w e have written about our need for it countless times. Well, we are talking of government where the phrase “snail’s pace” is normal. All is well that ends well.
With the truck ban, however, another problem cropped up. Big trucks would clog Marcos Highway’s junction with the roads going to Balacbac and Green Valley where they would park, occupying one lane on each side of that highway while waiting for the ban to expire at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.
Why not bulldoze a considerable part of the Bureau of Animal Industry lot beside the highway and convert it into a paid public terminal for vehicles? In fact, one private occupant of the lot did that already thinking that the ancestral claimants of the land who sold a part to him really had a valid title to it. Now the private occupants of the land who are considered illegal possessors are facing a demolition order. Many small structures there were demolished the other day but the concrete and well constructed ones for which their owners really spent big sums are still standing. If the authority for the demolition was not implemented equally, the public might get the impression that if you have money you can escape from demolition orders, but if you are small time, the government will demolish your structure without mercy.
The information I got was that the order to demolish was issued by a court and not by the city. So perhaps the implementers of the order, the sheriffs, might have adopted a different strategy—destroy the smaller structures first, then the bigger ones.
While it might be a court that issued the order, the city mayor has been talking about the demolition of illegal structures there many times in the past. So the people might wrongly lay the blame at his doorstep.
The demolition however is good for the mayor’s reputation. It shows that demolitions are being applied to all, the big fish and the small fish. It would be very difficult to explain to any layman how it could be fair for demolition orders to be mercilessly implemented on the small fish while the big structures at Marcos Highway remain unscathed.
As to the demolition of the structures at the BIBAK lot, the city mayor was very right when he said that the city’s officialdom is losing credibility for the repeated postponement of the well-anticipated demolition. In fact, if the demolition at Marcos Highway had not been started, the credibility problem would have been much much worse.
There is a common factor regarding the illegal structures at the BIBAK lot and the Marcos Highway lots, the CPLA.
Many illegal settlers in both lots say that the portions they occupy were bought from CPLA officers or commanders or that their invasion of both areas were by authority of the former. But who should really be blamed? The illegal settlers themselves. How can they be so gullible to believe that prime lots can be sold for a song? But of course this happens every time, everywhere. People don’t believe in what we always say here that if it sounds too good to be true, it is not true. We never learn from scams of the past, from the Dimensional and Agrix capers in the early 70s all the way to the 21 Days and the Satarah scams of late. Stupid.
So, going back to the CPLA, what can we say about the Regional Development Council’s apparent reliance on the CPLA troops (or squatters) in its drive for Cordillera Autonomy? Stupid also? But that would be another story.**
