How will PDEA bust 400-year-old Triads?

Three weeks ago Rody Duterte revealed that Chinese Triads are trafficking and transshipping shabu in the Philippines. The intelligence report came in the wake of a 604-kilo smuggling of the narcotic, worth P6.5 billion, from Xiamen to the Manila ports. Questions arose how the President, in only six years of tenure, can lick the 400-year-old crime syndicates known today as Bamboo Triad of Taiwan, 14K Triad of Hong Kong, and Sun Yee On of mainland China. Mighty emperors have come and gone, but those gangs, initially into prostitution, gambling, extortion, kidnapping, and murder-for-hire, have expanded in other continents to money-laundering, gunrunning, and narco-trading.

Events swirled fast since. An opposition senator linked Duterte’s son to the shabu sneak-in and the Triads. UN rights officials castigated his bloody war on drugs. A public poll showed six in ten Filipinos ruing that innocents were among the 3,850 slain in police raids, and seven in ten fearful of getting killed too. Duterte’s reaction to it all was to pull out the National Police, Armed Forces, NBI, and Customs from the drug war. Henceforth, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) is to take the lead.

Yet that is what a 2002 law already states. The Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act, or R.A. 9165, specifically formed the PDEA as the Dangerous Drugs Board’s implementing arm in the anti-narcotics drive. As such, PDEA was empowered to deputize the police, military, and other forces. Thus did the PNP form an Anti-Illegal Drugs Special Operating Task Force, and the NBI a Narcotics Division. As far back as the 1990s the Triads already had penetrated the Philippines, followed in the 2010s by the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico.

But with law enforcement forever strapped for funds and buffeted by political winds, the PDEA was unable to perform to the hilt. Presently it has barely 2,000 personnel spread over 17 regions. Only 1,100 are field agents adept in intelligence and operations; the rest are chemists, accountants, lawyers, and other backroom specialists. A region of five provinces and 12 cities, with a population of six million, has only 30 to 40 PDEA officers trained to sniff out and raid shabu factories and warehouses. With a budget of a billion pesos or so a year, it hardly has vehicles, spyware, and weapons to run after narcos. Not to mention, laboratories and other facilities to examine the seized drugs and build up criminal cases that would ensure conviction. All that, against wealthy gangs that have perfected organized crime through four centuries.

So PDEA director general Aaron Aquino, appointed only a month ago, was stunned with Duterte’s signal last week to step up to the plate. How he wishes his lead role would only be temporary. As short perhaps as the month-long pullout of the police last Feb. from the drug war, with PDEA taking solo role, after Duterte’s disgust with the kidnap-murder of a Korean retiree by police anti-drug officers right inside Camp Crame general headquarters.

But Aquino, who holds a master’s degree in public administration, has many pluses going for him. Having risen up the police ranks through 22 years in Duterte’s Davao, he enjoys the President’s trust. His mission is to dismantle the Triads’ local structure. Given his meager resources but deep intelligence, he would target narco-lords instead of street pushers. That could mean less blood in the streets, though not necessarily PDEA casualties, as drug rings expectedly will fight back. (The PDEA lost 11 men during its solo work last Feb. alone.)

Immediate past PDEA head Isidro Lapeña is now Customs chief. Naturally he would cover Aquino’s back at the air and seaports. Aquino’s batch mates from the Philippine Military Academy Class of 1985 have volunteered to help. One of them, Valfrie Tabian, now head of Corrections, is providing office space for PDEA men and sniff dogs right in the penitentiaries, from where convicts are known to run drug rings. The Maritime Industry Authority is to help track the movements of domestic and foreign ships through the archipelago, where some stray from routes to linger for a day or two off destinations. The Triads are said to be cooking and packaging shabu in the high seas, for delivery to coastal cities masked as duty-free cement.

The Senate is to raise PDEA’s operating budget from P1.2 billion this year to P2.6 billion in 2018. The House of Reps is planning to move the PNP’s P900-million anti-drug allocation for 2018 to the PDEA. Under Aquino the agency could grow once and for all into the lead role that the law assigned it to.

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Inventory the MRT-3’s warehouse of spare parts and equipment. That’s the reaction of railway experts to my report Friday on the risk of MRT-3 being billed again and again for gear it already paid for long ago. An audit would show what parts, quantity, serial numbers, and values there were before the maintenance contractor took over in Jan. 2016. It would itemize what remain in stock today. Whatever were used up or are missing, the contractor must pay for.

I wrote about the so-called “balikbayan” racket, in which railway officials collude with the parts supplier or maintenance contractor to collect from the government more than once for the same parts. The scam was discovered a decade ago at the Light Rail Transit Authority and the Philippine National Railways. Government had been defrauded of millions of pesos.

MRT-3 contractor Busan is seeking reimbursement of P4 million supposedly for two signaling components installed recently on coaches. Transport officials refuse to pay until Busan submits supporting papers, including certificate of origin, factory inspection, supplier’s invoice, bill of lading, delivery, acceptance, payment receipt, and warehousing entry. Busan cries that past officials used to reimburse it without fuss from Jan.-Sept. 2016, totaling over P650 million. Still, the documents are required by government auditors, as listed in Busan’s P3.8-billion contract.

Railway sources say upright suppliers and servicers always include the serial numbers of parts and equipment for which they bill the government. To suspicions that the P4-million signaling gear could have been cannibalized from wrecked trains, they say the serial numbers also can be erased by metal filing. In which case, those can be deemed bogus.

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