SAN NICOLAS—In about two years, the Villa Verde Road, a former mountain trail carved by the Red Arrow 32nd Division of the US Army and their Filipino counterparts at the end of World War II on the slopes of the Caraballo mountain range between Pangasinan and Nueva Vizcaya, will soon bridge the Ilocano and the Ibaloi cultures.
The new road—23 kilometers of which is on the Pangasinan side and the rest on Nueva Vizcaya side—will serve as the second roadlink between the Ilocos Region and Cagayan Valley, the first being the route from Laoag to Aparri, Cagayan via the treacherous Pattapat road.
Started in 2015, Villa Verde is expected to be connected to the completed Nueva Vizcaya side in Imugan, Sta. Fe by 2018 with a few more gaps along the way to be closed and a few more bridges to be built, the National Economic and Development Authority said early this year.
Once completed, it will bring the Ibalois of Barangay Malico, an upland community with the same climatic condition as that of Baguio City, nearer to the town of San Nicolas and the mainstream society in Pangasinan, where they really belong.
Former Pangasinan board member Ranjit Ramos Shahani, the top exponent for the construction of the Villa Verde road, an initiative he started when he was still congressman of the Sixth district of the province, lamented that the Villa Verde Trail would have been constructed earlier had the government used the money given by the United States government as US bases rental.
Instead, it was used by the administration of then President Corazon Aquino for the construction of the Rosales-Sta. Maria-Tayug-San Nicolas highway up to the foothills of the Caraballo mountains, a project completed during the administration of Shahani’s uncle, former President Fidel Ramos.
The late Marcos information officer Gregorio Cendana, a native of San Nicolas, even after his term also lobbied for the construction of the Villa Verde Road, which he saw as a vital life line from Cagayan to Pangasinan to serve as an alternate to the landslide-prone Dalton Pass in Sta. Fe, Nueva Vizcaya.
Construction of the project’s Phase I was almost discontinued when the Ikalahans led by the late Pastor Delbert Athur Rice mounted a protest, claiming that the project will disturb the plants and the birds teeming in the area, a claim later debunked by an Impact Assessment Study (IAS) conducted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
Unlike the IKalahans. the Ibalois wanted the road built as it will bring them closer to the markets of San Nicolas and Tayug than to Sta. Fe. Working in the Ibalois’ favor is the fact that for many years now, they have an IP (Indigenous People) representative in the town council of San Nicolas who articulates their concerns, dreams and aspirations.
With the opening of the road in 2018, it could trigger an unprecedented economic boom never before seen in both Region 1 and Region II and consequently uplift the lives of not only the Ilocanos, Ibaloism, Ikalahans, Ilongots and other IP communities in the north.