PNP seeks US help in tracking down Mexican drug cartel’s PH contact
FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine National Police is coordinating with the US Drug Enforcement Agency to locate the alleged Filipino-American conduit of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel which is reportedly in the United States, a police official said Friday.
The alleged connection has been identified as Jorge Gomez Torres, a cockfighting aficionado who leased the Batangas property that yielded half a billion pesos worth of shabu or metamphetamine hydrochloride during a Christmas Day raid by the police.
“It’s a big possibility that he [Torres] is the contact. He left for the US in the second week of December,” Chief Inspector Roque Merdegia, spokesperson of the PNP Anti-IIlegal Drugs Special Operations Task Force, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in a telephone interview.
Merdegia said Torres’ whereabouts in the United States have yet to be established.
Merdegia said aside from Torres, police authorities were also on the trail of other conduits to the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Merdegia denied allegations that the agents who raided the LPL Ranch in Barangay Inosluban in Lipa City stole fighting cocks on the game fowl farm.
“Our search warrant only covered the house. I am sure nothing went missing in the whole compound. We have a certificate of orderly search which was witnessed by two local officials,” Merdegia said.
He added that police were still investigating the ownership of the ranch, but said that according to documents in the possession of the authorities, Torres had a lease contract with the LPL Ranch.
In separate interviews, Merdegia and a military intelligence source told the Inquirer that the Sinaloa drug cartel was not exactly a well-entrenched syndicate in the Philippines.
It is just one of several foreign organizations doing business in the international drug trade and has established a business network in the country, the Inquirer’s military source said on condition of anonymity.
“It’s one of the groups that enters the country but it doesn’t really have a very big clout here. It is not well-entrenched but it has dealings with the drug syndicates here,” said the the source, an intelligence officer.
The source said Philippine authorities were already on the trail of a local drug syndicate with connections to the Sinaloa drug cartel since five years ago.
Merdegia said the Mexican drug cartels, not just Sinaloa, first offered cocaine to its local counterparts in the country.
“But cocaine didn’t sell well here, that’s why they shifted to shabu,” Merdegia said.
Shabu is also known as the “poor man’s drug.” The high cost of cocaine, on the other hand, makes it the “rich man’s drug.”
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