Baguio City’s problems today were born from old political passivity, traffic, that is.
This is revealed in detail in the autobiography of a former Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) Regional Director James Valeros in his book “Stowaway.”
His accounts tell of how, as a young teenager, he escaped his oppressive father by stowing away on a train from Camarines Sur to Manila. He describes how his illiterate father squandered his mother’s inherited lands in Paracale through womanizing and gambling, only to be accepted again by a loyal wife after almost a decade.
Valeros describes how he helped his mother support himself and three younger siblings in their brood of
eight. With his older siblings already of age and with their own destinies, Valeros recounts how he tied his drunk father to the same bench where he whipped them at his whim.
He encounters colorful characters in his first years as a runaway, like General Ramon Aguirre who led troops in the Korean War and Captain Catalino Cruz who fought the Hukbalahap under the alias Ernesto Palma. During his time in Quiapo and other parts of Manila, Valeros is groomed by gangster Ben Ulo Mendoza as a lookout in large-scale robberies after the latter developed some fondness for him. This chapter of his life is short lived because it involved doing unlawful things and did not fit his definition of adventure.
He then gravitates towards Alitagtag, Batangas where he is hired as a house helper and is eventually adopted by former Mayor Anastacia Hernandez and then-Police Chief Mauricio Jasa to complete his high school education in their town.
He graduates top of his class and hurdles the Philippine Military Academy exam. The town takes pride in him, and he is escorted to Camp Aguinaldo where the new plebes board the bus to Baguio City. He graduated as a member of Class ‘64 and joined the Philippine Air Force. His wings were clipped as a pilot twice as he defies the rule that flying school trainees cannot marry. When he finally wins his case that questioned the constitutionality of the order, he meets an accident (when he completes his training) that leaves him unconscious for three days. This grounds him for life and relegates him to a teaching post in PMA.
At this stage of his life, he met Victor Corpus as co-instructor to Class ’71, with the likes of Gregorio Honasan, Victor Batac, and Eduardo Kapunan of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) during the EDSA revolution. Valeros retires with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He decides to engage in business, concerned with the effects of his head injury. He is challenged by doctors to keep his brain working, so he enrolls in the Baguio Colleges Foundation College of Law and graduates in 1982. He passed the bar exams in the same year.
He was then called to the Land Transportation Commission (LTC) which was changed to the LTFRB by 1987. He became regional director when the Cordillera Administrative Region was created. In his 36 years with the LTFRB, the issuances of franchises were the core of his responsibilities.
He notes in his book, “the increasing traffic congestion in Baguio City where I reside arises from the short and narrow sizes of routes which were planned by the Americans for a population of 25,000 only, heightened further by the influx of visitors and tourists on weekends and holidays. This led the office to strictly regulate traffic by closing some routes and imposing a self-declared moratorium which was
protested by stakeholder applicants for Certificates of Public Conveyance (CPC), arguing that the Regional Director of the Office was not given the power under the law to regulate by moratorium.”
“The moratorium in the city which I religiously implemented during my tenure and before I was reassigned to LTFRB Region IV on rotation was, unfortunately, not enforced by succeeding regional directors. Worse, this was consented to by the City Mayor Mauricio Domogan during his three terms in office, believing the public need and necessity should be the controlling factor,” he further says.
There are other interesting details about this city in the book “Stowaway,” which is only available at Mt. Cloud Bookshop.
