For many years now, international law enforcement agencies have tagged the Philippines as a transshipment point for prohibited drugs. As the war on drugs has shown, the country also continues to be attractive to manufacturers and distributors of methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu.
Officials of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency have said that in their interrogation of foreigners arrested for drug trafficking, the suspects have cited weak law enforcement aggravated by corruption as well as the absence of capital punishment for their decision to operate in the Philippines.
Similar reasons are likely driving crime rings to use the country for cocaine trafficking. Last Sunday, 36 bricks of cocaine weighing over a kilo each were found floating near the shore by a resident in Caraga, Davao Oriental. Authorities placed the street value of the drugs at P5.2 million. On the same day, a similar brick was found by a fisherman in the waters off Gabaldon in Nueva Ecija.
In the past weeks, cocaine bricks were also found in the waters of Camarines Norte and Quezon province and on the islands of Dinagat and Siargao. Law enforcement officials have yet to establish the source of the drugs. One theory is that drug traffickers are unloading the bricks in the high seas either by ships or aircraft, to be picked up by smaller vessels and delivered to the drug dealers’ cohorts in coastal communities.
The country has one of the most extensive coastlines in the world. Combined with a weak capability to patrol coastal areas, the country is an ideal area of operation for drug traffickers. Drug smuggling through the high seas has been reported in the past in places such as Pangasinan and Subic, with Filipinos implicated.
A worrisome possibility is that the drug money is being used to bankroll the campaigns of certain politicians. It’s significant that in this election season, 10 incidents of cocaine bricks retrieved in coastal waters have been reported since the start of the year alone.
President Duterte has made the war on illegal drugs a top priority of his administration. The spate of recoveries of cocaine bricks in coastal areas indicates a weakness that drug traffickers are exploiting. That weakness must be confronted with urgency and decisive action.