‘Drug mules’

In March of last year, three so-called drug mules—Ramon Credo, Sally Ordinario-Villanueva and Elizabeth Batain—were executed in China for possession of large quantities of prohibited drugs.

On Thursday next week, Dec. 8, another Filipino is about to be meted the same penalty of death in the same country. While still unnamed, he is the fourth in a year to receive lethal injection for drug trafficking.

If trends do not change, he most certainly will not be the last.

Six in 10 Filipinos detained overseas are arrested forcrimes involving prohibited drugs; 600 them are detained in prisons abroad; about 250 are incarcerated in China, 79 of whom are already in death row. Most of them are women; many are professionals.

The United Nations, in its 2009 World Drug Report, conferred on the Philippines an embarrassing distinction—the country with the fifth highest methamphetamine confiscation record for the period 1998 to 2007.

Internationally, arrests involving Filipino nationals in possession of drugs have been recorded in countries such as China, Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Laos and Vietnam. For most of these countries, large-scale drug trafficking of prohibited substances is punishable by death. Worse, most of them do not treat offenders with the same “westernized” system of justice to which most Filipinos are accustomed.

According to the human rights organization Amnesty International, many of these territories treat capital punishment as “state secret.” In Vietnam, publishing figures related to death penalties is prohibited by law. In Japan, “death row inmates are not informed of their forthcoming execution, nor are their families or lawyers... in Viet Nam the bodies of the executed prisoners are not returned to their families for burial,” Amnesty says.

These are just some of the risks to which migrant workers are subjected on a daily basis. And the hazards grow proportionately alongside an indirect tendency of promoting overseas employment as a means to either economic growth or national survival.

In 2010, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency, the country “exported” another 1.4 million of its citizens to the world’s salt mines. In the same year, World Bank statistics showed the Philippines as the nation with the fourth largest annual remittance inflow at $21.3 billion.

Remittances have ostensibly kept the economy afloat amid the regional economic crises and despite the many natural calamities. But little has been done by government so migrant workers do not have to be the saviors of the economy.

Three million Filipinos are unemployed and nearly 7 million are underemployed. Annually, thousands of our doctors abandon the prestige of their profession for the financial expediency of being nurses in other countries.

The same temptations that induce doctors to become nurses or professionals to take on blue-collar occupations are not far removed from the same enticements that seduce the less-privileged and not-as-educated from being “drug mules.” There simply are not too many options at home.

And when they do leave the safety of their motherland, the best protection they can expect, should the worst happen, is that their country will always be ready to send a top-level envoy, no less than the vice president of the republic, to grovel and fawn on their behalf.