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In a previous column, I wrote that as chief overseer of the government’s anti-illegal drugs campaign, President Gloria Arroyo should consider the inputs of Congress if she wants to be thoroughly informed about the dangerous drugs issue. Over the past seven years of her administration, the Lower House looked into a number of cases on traffic of illegal drugs. These congressional inquiries were widely covered by the media and, to my mind, three separate hearings stood out because of the ineptness and sluggishness of key government agencies tasked to arrest the growing drug menace.
Congress inquired into the drug situation in Central Visayas in 2001, an investigation that eventually focused on the alleged drug smuggling activities of two local businessmen.
The 2001 investigation conducted by the House dangerous drugs committee, then headed by Cebu City Congressman Antonio Cuenco, is worthy of mention not only because a top NBI official insulted the members of Congress by playing golf instead of attending the House hearings, but also because today one of the whistleblowers, Bernard Liu, is bearing the brunt of the legal action filed by the brothers Peter and Wellington Lim as a consequence of Liu’s testimony and the committee’s failure to pin the businessmen down on illegal narcotics activities. Trying to vainly fend off before the Court of Appeals the warrant of arrest issued against him by the Cebu Regional Trial Court three years later, the witness bewailed why he is being punished for testifying. Liu’s fate has had a chilling effect on those who may have inside information on the illegal narcotics trade.
The case of a very large cache of amphetamines that went missing after it arrived in the port of Manila from Seoul, South Korea, in November 2001 was a subject of a probe conducted jointly by the committees on dangerous drugs and public order and security. Then National Bureau of Investigation director Reynaldo Wycoco revealed that Seoul counterparts tipped him that about 100 kilos of shabu hidden in a cargo of vermicelli or noodles will be transported to Manila in a 40-foot container van via Hong Kong. Wycoco confirmed the illegal cargo arrived shortly after midnight of November 17 on board the vessel Manila Star but after two days in the Customs container yard the shipment was released reportedly without the knowledge of NBI officials.
Shocked over how a large shipment of illegal drugs could disappear under the very noses of NBI and Bureau of Customs officials, Ilocos Norte Congressman Roque Ablan exposed the anomaly in a privilege speech. Summoned to appear before the joint House committees, the officials described a bizarre entrapment operation that allowed the delivery of the drug cargo to a fictitious address in Binondo, Manila, only to be led to nowhere in Bulacan. The House hearing abruptly ended after Congress was fed with a letter from a supposed police authority in Seoul, saying that the drug shipment was just 500 grams of amphetamines.
Still fresh in our minds is the raid conducted by the police on a drug den in Mapayapa compound, Pasig City, in October 2006. The case is significant for many reasons. First, the “shabu tiangge” was located in the middle of an urban center, just a few steps from the Pasig City Hall. Police arrested more than 300 people, mostly minors, but the protectors and mastermind of the illicit trade have not been identified. The scandal precipitated another congressional investigation in aid of legislation but instead of cooperating with Congress and police authorities, the Pasig City Council passed a resolution that enabled the local mayor to demolish the shabu tiangge and consequently wipe away evidence.
Official records in these three cases reveal to some degree the enormity of the illegal drug problem to the extent that it is now causing what US drug enforcement officials call “narcotics insurgency.” (To be continued)
