By Mortz C. Ortigoza
While I was inside a taxi last Wednesday bound to the Davao International Airport from my short stay in a Cotabato town, I asked the driver if illegal drugs have returned to Davao City after President Rodrigo Duterte ended his six years in Malacanang Palace.
The chauffeur told me the southern island city – the biggest in the south – continue to enjoy the almost narcotics free environment just like when Duterte was the mayor and president.
During the two stints of Duterte, dope peddlers avoided like the plague his turf otherwise they would find themselves with a bullet hole on the head or a slashed of a knife on the throat courtesy of the anti-narcotic hit men of the 182 villages’ city and the cops. These peace officers were under the leadership of his national police chief General Ronald ”Bato” dela Rosa.
Davao City is now under the mayorship of Duterte’s tattooed scion Sebastian "Baste" Duterte.
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I posed my query to the driver because after Mayor Baste’s father stepped down from office in June 31, 2022 and succeeded by the weakling President Bongbong Marcos, Jr., dope peddling was back in the Philippines with a vengeance.
Worse, some of the bigtime drug pushers who proliferated the trade of shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) in the country are members of the Philippines National Police. They were the same attack dogs President Digong allegedly unleashed to go against the drug traffickers in his nine years in office. Under Duterte’s take-no-prisoner approach, 12,000 Filipinos mostly urban poor have died according to the Human Rights Watch. Many of these murdered by the police however were innocents and plain junkies, human rights groups assailed.
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In October 8, 2022, a mere police master sergeant in Rodolfo Mayo had been seized with more than two kilos of shabu after he was accosted by his fellow cops in the Philippines Drug Enforcement Group (PDEG) and the Manila police along the Quezon Bridge, Quezon Blvd. in Quiapo, Manila
They found out later on the same day that his Wealth and Personal Development Lending Inc. (WPDL) in Tondo, Manila hid another 1,035 kilos of meth that included the 42 kilos found to have pilfered by those, susmariosep, raiding cops of PDEG at the WPDL. The meth could be worth more than the P6.7 billion based on the earlier accounting by the police of the 990 kilos. The stolen meths were recovered on Oct. 15, 2022 in an abandoned sedan parked along Boni Serrano Avenue in San Juan City near Camp Crame – the national police headquarter.
Mayo superior in the special operation unit of the PDEG- National Capital Region is Police Lt. Colonel Arnulfo Ibanez.
Ibanez was found too by one of the Senate hearings chaired by Senator Ronald dela Rosa to coddle drug bodegero Mike Sy – the top mainland Chinese drug lord in the Philippines today – according to dela Rosa.
If Duterte is still the President of this cursed country teetering to be a Colombia and a Mexico on drug problems, those cops suspected to harbor Mayo and Ibanez could have already been assassinated - including these two purported malefactors.
Without the fear of a death penalty legislated by Congress, the tons of monies to be raked by the police and their Chinese drug kingpins will be hard to resist and they will continue to poison the minds of the Filipino youth particularly.
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Someday, the drug lords in this country will grow as big as the syndicate under Drug Baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia where 12 Justices of the Supreme Court, three presidential candidates’ hostile to narcs, and 10, 000 to 15,000 Colombians brutally died through assassinations by sicarios (guns for hires on motorcycles), car and plane bombings.
We will be seeing someday in the Pinoyland that the bodyguards of the Drug Lords hail directly from the special forces of the military and the police and paid multiple times than their counterparts and better armed to challenge this wimping government just like what the cartel of Dope Boss Ovidio Guzmán (the son of the ruthless Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán – the U.S jailed boss of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel) when they and their hired former soldiers and police battled the military and the cops that forced the pushover Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to release Ovidio in October 2019 to avoid a blood bath in his country.
In that intense firefight, the cartel used dump trucks armed with 50 caliber machine guns and armed men who shoot out with the beleaguered state security. They even damaged, susmariosep, two combat helicopters of the government as countless military choppers joined the melee.
Someday this pathetic scenario in Mexico and Colombia will be happening in the Philippines cum Flipland after President Marcos and his government could not manage competently their war on the Chinese drug barons and their conspirators in the police force.
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MORTZ C. ORTIGOZA
I am a twenty years seasoned Op-Ed Political Writer in various newspapers and Blogger exposing government corruptions, public officials idiocy and hypocrisies, and analyzing local and international issues. I have a master’s degree in Public Administration and professional government eligibility. I taught for a decade Political Science and Economics in universities in Metro Manila and cities of Urdaneta, Pangasinan and Dagupan. Follow me on Twitter @totoMortz or email me at totomortz@yahoo.com.
