We can win the war vs illegal drugs
Call it a grand way to end our Sinulog Festivities when the following day, last Monday we woke up to non-stop rains from dawn to dusk. I searched the internet for signs of a storm or low pressure area, but there was none. I reckon that these rains were simply monsoon rains like what they have in Bangladesh or in India.
In his Facebook page, my good friend Nagiel Bañacia uploaded a lot of photos of many barangay roads in the mountains of Cebu City that have shifted due to landslides or simply the mountainsides have moved. By looking at those photos, one can see that the washed-away concrete road do not have any cables to link it together, hence the cemented road was not strong enough to hold itself and simply washed by the flow of the water.
This was also happening in Mindanao where the river along Cagayan de Oro had also swollen and flooded the entire downtown area, very much similar to what happened during typhoon "Sendong." Mayor Oscar Moreno has now declared state of calamity in the city. A day after typhoon "Sendong" struck, I arrived in Cagayan de Oro and saw the extent of the flooding. At this point, we are still having a low pressure area and we can only pray that the rains would end soon.
Incidentally, I woke up early morning yesterday literally shivering in the cold. Yet, I didn't even turn on my electric fan and when I checked the weather bulletin, Cebu City was 23 degrees at 6:30AM. I don't know if this is part of climate change, but there was a tail end of a cold front that swooped down into the Visayas. So brace yourself for more cold mornings.
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While we do not have any records (maybe our fellow columnist Atty. Paul Oaminal has a record) of the drug haul during the presidency of then president Benigno "PNoy" Aquino III because I do not recall reading of any such report, it was truly gratifying to read in the news yesterday that the Philippine National Police reported that over P3.7 billion-worth of illegal drugs were seized in the first six months of the Duterte administration.
Of course, this comes at a price of nearly 3,000 deaths from the so-called "extra judicial killings" or EJK. As the PNP reported of this number 1,466 were killed during the PNP's "double barrel" drive against illegal drugs since Duterte assumed office. This means, the other half of those deaths, happened under the Aquino regime. According to the PNP report, 16,025 drug suspects have been arrested and are now in custody.
In six months, Oplan "Tokhang" has netted a total of 52,568 self-confessed drug peddlers who have surrendered and 659,959 drug users. They are the lucky ones because they surrendered to the police without a fight. The rest are now what we call statistics. So are we winning the war against illegal drugs? At this point, we cannot yet make such a conclusion for as long as those mayors, a few governors and numerous barangay officials that are on the list of narco-politicians in the possession of Duterte are not exposed to the media and the Filipino people.
But one thing is certain, the crime rate in this country have gone down by at least 50 percent, which is a very high number. What is important for the PNP is not to let up in this campaign against illegal drugs and continue to push harder and above all, cleanse the ranks of the PNP of officers involved in the illegal drug trade and then we can win this war against illegal drugs!
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In three days time, America will inaugurate at the steps of the US Capitol its 45th Chief Executive President Donald Trump in a historic first, as he is not the usual politician, but a billionaire businessman. We can't predict how a Trump presidency will be, but certainly, it is good riddance to Pres. Barrack Obama, where in his own hometown of Chicago, 4,000 murders were done under Obama's eight-year term. Just in 2016 alone, 750 people were murdered in Chicago and yet Obama had the gall to task Pres. Duterte for the EJK happening in our country.
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