Learn from Mexico’s soaring murder rate

Monday’s public shooting of a Batangas mayor swells the list of murders in the past two years. Coinciding with it was the slaying inside his Cebu home of a retired prosecutor. As well, the separate ambushes on a Muslim regional assemblyman and an Isabela barangay chief, in which their aides died.

The Batangas killing quickly was linked (by President Rodrigo Duterte) to drugs. In Cebu the attackers had asked the ex-prosecutor to lawyer for a jailed druggie, the wounded wife said. Police are looking at drug angles in the latter two homicides, as they routinely do these days since gangs are retaliating for drug busts.

The National Police records 22,983 killings – 33 a day – from July 1, 2016 to May 21, 2018. Most are drug-related. That is, narco-syndicates fighting over turf or silencing surrendered gang mates, and vigilantes cleansing neighborhoods of pushers. Those are separate from the 4,279 drug suspects slain for firing back in police raids and buy-busts, says the Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management. Rounding off the stats, PNP spokesman Sr. Supt. Benigno Durana reports 16,000-plus, or 70 percent, of the homicides solved. About 10,000 have suspects identified and charged, and 6,000 being tried in court.

 Still, the Philippine drug murder rate is going the way of Mexico. In 2017 alone 25,340 persons were slain in that country’s drug war. The toll is expected to exceed 30,000 this year. Mexico and the Philippines share more features than common Spanish colonization. Mexico lies in the path of South America’s coca cartels to the world’s biggest market for narcotics, the United States. The Philippines is both transshipment and end point of shabu (meth) and opium from China and the Golden Triangle borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. In Mexico and the Philippines top officials have had to lead the drug wars. Despite their efforts, the menace seems to be worsening.

Mexican president Felipe Calderon, 2006-2012, unleashed the army on narco-traffickers, machine-gunning them from US-donated Blackhawk attack helicopters. Successor Enrique Peña Nieto, 2012-2018, at first halved the murder rate, but soon was overtaken by new developments. Directionless with the arrest of capos, paranoid gangsters took to killing civilians, like three film students dunked into an acid vat in Guadalajara. Others branched out into kidnapping and extortion, forcing investors and tourists to flee. The Coca Cola factory shut down in violent Guerrero state while bodies are piling up in morgues to stench up Tijuana in tripled murder rate, the Economist reported in May. Elected only last Sunday, populist leftist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will have his hands full. The gangs have moved to control relatively peaceful states.

The Philippines can learn from Mexico. Duterte has notched major victories against narco-traders: 192 shabu laboratories and dens dismantled; P20.77 billion worth of narcotics seized and 123,648 arrested in 91,704 anti-drug operations; three million druggies surrendered; and 6,462 barangays declared drug-free. Still, the murders continue. As in Mexico, law enforcement is still poor against homicides.

The PNP has yet to devise ways to counteract so-called “riding-in-tandem” street assassins on motorcycles. Despite the extension of martial law in Mindanao, loose firearms still proliferate in politicos’ armories and ordinary homes. Only in towns around Marawi City did the army confiscate hundreds of long arms from political warlords during the five-month siege by Islamist terrorists. Inversely, Malacañang proposes to arm barangay chiefs, state prosecutors, judges, journalists, even priests and other sectors that emerge as targets for slaying. Experts worry that that would only exacerbate the homicides.

From prisons continue to be planned seven most heinous crimes: murder-for-hire, kidnapping for ransom, drug trafficking, bank robbery, extortion, protection racket, and money laundering. Shabu smuggling goes on either at the piers or by drop-offs along the thousands of miles of unguarded coastlines.

Better training and equipment are needed to solve the murders. Hand in hand must come the construction of more prisons, and the speedup of court trials. Sen. Panfilo Lacson, a former PNP director general, proposes a more basic strategy: police visibility.

The two administrations before Duterte had let the murder problem fester. Funds for police choppers were wasted, along with those for patrol cars and crime-fighting gear. Sen. Grace Poe is to head an inquiry into the billions of wasted pesos. Only now is a retired police general solving the past Land Transport Office’s messy vehicle plate deal that left millions of cars, trucks, and motorcycles without proper identification in case of crime use.

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