A war without end

The controversial drug war is now in its endgame, according to the Philippine National Police, which describes it as the “finale” of Double Barrel.

Apart from a focus on rehabilitating over one million drug personalities who surrendered under Oplan Tokhang, the PNP says it is also intensifying the law enforcement aspect, now that COVID restrictions have been eased.

Within just a week, government agents seized approximately 1,660 kilograms of shabu in two operations, in Valenzuela on March 8, and in Infanta, Quezon on March 15.

At P6.8 million per kilo – the current street value of shabu, according to the lawmen – the 160 kilos seized in Valenzuela were worth P1.088 billion, while the 1.5 tons intercepted in Infanta cost P10.2 billion.

That’s a whopping P11.288 billion worth of shabu that, fortunately, government agents managed to intercept. But you wonder how much more have managed to slip into the country.

And you wonder what happened to the deterrence that Oplans Tokhang and Double Barrel’s shock and awe strategy was supposed to have imparted to drug dealers and dopeheads in this country. You mean more than 6,000 people killed by lawmen (by their own count) in anti-narcotics operations failed to put the fear of God (or Duterte) in the hearts of users, pushers and large-scale traffickers?

Clearly not. The 1.66 tons seized in the two recent operations were not the first such large hauls since 2016, when Filipinos waited for Duterte to make good on his promise to eradicate the drug menace in six months.

Six years later, Duterte at least is honest enough to admit – without uttering the word “failure” – that the drug menace remains very much around, and the battle will have to be continued by the next administration.

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Throughout the past six years, while drug suspects were being killed as if in a turkey shoot, large-scale drug trafficking continued, with the contraband even breezing right past the Bureau of Customs (BOC), and with some operations believed headed by convicts from their kubols in the New Bilibid Prisons.

It didn’t help deterrence that the brutal campaign appeared selective, with Cebu businessman Peter Lim among those spared in those crucial first six months. Lim, whose family reportedly supported Duterte’s candidacy, even enjoyed an audience with the President himself on July 15, 2016 at the Davao City office of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, to declare that he was not the Peter Lim in the PDEA’s order of battle.

Days later on July 28, then PDEA chief Isidro Lapeña confirmed in a TV interview that the guy who met with Duterte was the same Peter Lim wanted by the agency. Six years later, Lim remains at large, despite an order for his arrest issued by a Makati court in 2018.

There was also that congressional probe that went nowhere. Does anyone still remember Customs broker Mark Taguba, Davao cop Arthur Lascañas, the so-called Davao Group that allegedly worked with crooks in BOC-Davao and the smuggling of billions worth of shabu, some of which were seized in Valenzuela?

Where is Taguba now? Truly, it doesn’t pay to be a whistle-blower in this country.

This happened only in 2017, and already we have forgotten. How can you expect Filipinos to remember atrocities from 40 to 50 years ago?

And yes, there’s a presidential candidate who’s a cocaine user, as Duterte publicly announced on national TV. If the president and nemesis of illegal drugs himself knows there is this high-value drug personality freely roaming the country, why has the cokehead been spared from Tokhang and Double Barrel?

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We have to acknowledge that Duterte’s Tokhang forces did succeed in eradicating several notorious drug personalities, among them the Parojinog clan members and former Albuera mayor Rolando Espinosa.

The methods employed will always be questioned. But – as Duterte implied to us when he still had time to meet with journalists instead of limiting himself to chats with his favorite interviewer, accused child sex trafficker and fraudster Apollo Quiboloy – it can be hard to pin down the big-ticket narcos. They are wise enough to keep their distance from their merchandise. In the rare times that they get arrested, they have all the dirty money to pay off hoodlums in robes, jail custodians and immigration officers.

I know people from the areas where most of the killings took place who were genuinely glad that the dopehead troublemakers in their neighborhoods were eliminated.

The weakness of the justice system made Filipinos support Duterte’s brutal war on drugs. The support began floundering only when even teenagers accused of petty drug pushing turned up dead with bullet wounds, their wrists tied behind them and their heads bound with plastic and packing tape.

Such scenes failed to horrify the drug personalities behind some of the biggest drug hauls and many of the clandestine shabu laboratories in the country: the Chinese.

A Chinese man was arrested together with a Filipina in the recent drug bust in Karuhatan, Valenzuela.

In the Infanta operation, the 10 suspects claimed they were hired simply to pick up on their boat unidentified cargo from a yacht and a boat that stopped between Polillo Island in Quezon and the exclusive island resort of Balesin. The suspects said a man speaking Chinese gave instructions as the cargo was transferred to the suspects’ boat, which then proceeded to Infanta. Lawmen later said the shabu arrived in the country through Alabat Island in Quezon.

The cargo was transferred to three white vans, which were intercepted at a military-police checkpoint in the town. When opened, the sealed sacks were found to contain 600 Chinese tea packs filled with shabu.

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This kind of drug trafficking is not new. Even in the 1990s, there were reports of illegal drugs entering the country through our porous coastlines, with some officials of coastal communities even involved in the operations.

A prominent restaurateur was allegedly among those whose yachts picked up the drugs from ships in the open sea and brought in the contraband. I’m sure similar operations have been common even before martial law.

PDEA officials have asked Chinese suspects they arrested why they continue to operate in the Philippines. Among the reasons cited were the absence of capital punishment (the Chinese have not suffered from EJKs here) and the ease of bribing Philippine officials.

Not even China, which regularly carries out the death penalty, has managed to end the drug scourge.

In our country, if an alleged cocaine addict succeeds Duterte, the drug dealers will celebrate from election day until long after the swearing in.

There is no endgame. This is a war without end.