By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
I think it was in 1965 when then Senator Ferdinand E. Marcos travelled all the way to my hometown, Besao, Mountain Province to campaign for the presidency. A week or two after, the incumbent president then, Diosdado Macapagal, also came to town for the same purpose.
Both presidential candidates promised a better life for everyone. During that time, if you traveled from Baguio City to Besao, it took you eight hours to get there by bus. And you would have eaten a bowl of dust.
Traveling by car, like the new cars now, was out of the question. As one friend from Buguias put it, “Mapigis a.” Either you took the bus or a truck, or a hard core 4×4. The Halsema Highway was aptly referred to as the Mountain Trail. It was not a highway at all. It was more like a dry river bed.
Not that there were no cars running there. The ones that could take the roughness of the road were the old, big, gas-guzzler American cars. Over the years, people ended up calling the Halsema Highway “Abortion Road.” It even got worse that it was also referred to as “Suicide Road”
It stayed that way despite the many politicians who have come and gone from the time of Marcos and Macapagal up to the 1990s, or long after Marcos was driven out by angry mobs in 1986.
For us who had to travel the Halsema every time, their promises of a better life never materialized. In the 90s during the time of Pres. Fidel Valdez Ramos, the cementing of the Baguio to Buguias segment started. It was finished during his term.
The Benguet to Bontoc segment was later continued by President GMA, the late President Diodado Macapagal’s daughter. So for us from Mountain Province, we had been eating bowls of dust whenever we traveled the Halsema. In short, the late President Macapal and President Marcos did not do anything about our suffering due to the condition of that road.
As a result our economic conditions were bad during all those decades. In general, life was difficult.
If you are an ordinary person like me, chances are, your life will not change much no matter who will be elected in the national levels or even in your locality.
For that purpose, we should think more about improving our sources of livelihood. Let us crack our brains how to raise more money. If you are employed think of ways on how to improve your qualifications so you will be qualified for promotion. Go get your master’s degree if you have to, or even a PhD.
Or you can get trained to acquire new skills and become qualified for other better-paying jobs.
If you are in business, why not explore opportunities for expansion that do not require much capital expenditures or investments. Your existing resources just might be able to afford the opportunity for expansion.
The other side of that is cost-cutting. Less expenses means more savings, and being more competitive. Looking at your cost centers in a microscopic way and they may reveal areas that had been siphoning a lot of your cash. Narrowing such holes can mean a better bottom line and the capacity to deal better with bad situations like the pandemic we are still going through.
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