Erasing Baguio from the map...

...or at least what Baguio is,was, all about.

That's what SM City Baguio, along with others like it who look at Baguio and only see a market, their bottom line. They're out to totally eradicate what's left of the city's former natural beauty, the quality of life that its residents were once privileged to live, its culture, its heritage. SM City Baguio is the ruin of the City of Baguio.

SM City Baguio announced recently that it's all-systems-go for their ill-conceived expansion plan - the Temporary Restraining Order issued by the Supreme Court in 2015 only covered the cutting and earth-balling of trees, they claimed, and not the total eradication of the hill that served as the birthplace of Baguio as a city.

The Manila Standard trumpeted the expansion project's features that will allegedly "help absorb the impact of climate change such as a Sky Park, a state-of-the-art sewerage treatment plant, and an underground rainwater catchment tank having a capacity of 7,432.54 cubic meters of water which could be used in mall operations." A man-made Sky Park in lieu of 182 trees that form one of the last remaining forest covers of the city's central business district that nature nurtured for decades in this age of climate change? I don't think so. Not surprisingly, anymore from this paper and writer, there was no mention of the protesters' justifications for their opposition to the project.

They forward their plan to build a state-of-the-art sewerage treatment plant and a rainwater catchment tank as if we should get on our knees and thank them for their beneficence, when these are among the least they can do when they built one the biggest mall in one of the smallest towns in terms of land area and resources in Northern Luzon. The city's residents still have to contend with rationed water, where did they think they should get their water to supply their over 300 stores. The city is still plagued by a garbage crisis, what exactly are they doing not to add to Baguio's burden?

So the Supreme Court has spoken, they said. Well, we can say this: the movement that has come to be known as Save 182 turned to our legal system to seek justice (a salute to our legal representatives led by Cheryl L. Daytec-Yañgot and Christopher Donaal), while SM City Baguio did all it can to find loopholes in it to perpetuate a crime against a city's, a people's constitutional right, its history, its heritage (thanks to their legal mercenaries at the ACCRA and Fortun law offices).

I've discussed this issue extensively in my previous posts, and after four years of struggling to save what's left of our beautiful city from corporate greed, do we now just raise our hands and accept defeat?

We may be facing a loss in the battle to save Luneta Hill, but the struggle to save Baguio from SM's insatiable greed, along others like it, along a corrupt bureaucracy and political system, must go on.

The future of Baguio depends on this struggle. Our quality of life, our lives, in fact, and those of our children's children, depend on it.