January 4, 2014 at 1:47am
The recent Christmas Day police raid on a methamphetamine hydrochloride storage facility - in a ranch in Lipa, Batangas rented from paroled convicted killer Antonio Leviste – yielded P420 million pesos ($10 million)worth of “shabu” drugs and the discovery of a new player in the Philippine drug market.
"The Mexicans are here.This is the first time that we have confirmed it," a Philippine NationalPolice (PNP) official said as he announced the filing of charges against Gary Tan,who was arrested in the raid, along with Jorge Gomez Torres, a Filipino American with a US passport, and. two other Mexican nationals identified only as alias Jaime and alias Joey, all of whom are “accordingly affiliated” with the powerful Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.
The Mexican cartels already supply more than 80% of the methamphetamine in the US. At the Los Angeles International Airport, nearly 3 tons of methylamine chloride were recently intercepted by US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents on a flight from China to Mexico. These drugs would be routinely manufactured into methamphetamine in Mexico and sold on the streets of the US for billions of dollars.
As the Stars and Stripes newspaper noted, “an explosion in such chemical ingredients from China has made it clear that the U.S. meth problem is no longer just about local police and homemade drug labs in the heartland. A global manufacturing and trafficking network now spans the Pacific, connecting Chinese chemical factories, bloody drug cartels in Mexico and users in the UnitedStates, according to defense and drug enforcement officials.”
Not only drug users in the US, but also in the Philippines. According to Sen. Vicente Sotto, former chair of the DangerousDrugs Board, there are approximately 1.6 million drug dependents in the Philippines,half of whom use shabu. Other estimates place shabu users at 90%, not 50%.
“If 800,000 drug users sniffa gram of shabu a week at P1,800 a gram for one year, “the amount will run into the billions,” he said. By Sotto’s formula, shabu sales in the Philippines would annually reach more than P77.76 billion (almost $2 billion). More than the Philippine government's budget.
SEEKING DEA ASSISTANCE
PNP Chief Gen. Alan Purisima said the Sinaloa cartel is getting help from Chinese drug traffickers to establish operations in the Philippines. To counteract this problem, his agency is getting help from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in seeking to arrest Torres, the Filipino-American conduit of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, who fled to the US a week before the raid.
Gen. Purisima may likely b emeeting with the DEA agents at the US Embassy in Manila to discuss the coordination of efforts to track down the Sinaloa cartel connections to the Philippines. I know the DEA has agents at the US Embassy in Manila because I met them in 2003.
In my last column (http://globalnation.inquirer.net/94699/the-questions-about-czar-lacsons-assets), I described my personal encounter with Sen. Panfilo Lacson at the TV talk show, Strictly Politics, on January 21, 2013. The following morning after the show, I received a call from a man who identified himself as an official at the US Embassy in Manila who wanted to meet me.
I thought that as a US citizen, the US Embassy was just expressing concern about my safety given Lacson’s reputation for making his enemies disappear. So I arrived promptly at the gate of the US Embassy in Manila at the appointed hour and the officer was there to escort me to his office. Inside the heavily fortified back office of the US Embassy, I was led to a room, where another officer was watching the tail end of a videotape of my run in with Lacson.
“You didn’t go to law school in the Philippines, did you?” he asked as I nodded and he explained that he guessed so because no one locally could talk to Sen. Lacson as I did and still expect to be breathing. I laughed, nervously.
The two gentlemen then introduced themselves as DEA agents assigned to the US Embassy. Their interest was not about my welfare but in securing whatever financial information I had uncovered about Lacson’s assets in the US. I readily shared my documents with them.
NARCO STATE
The DEA agents explained that they had been investigating Lacson for some time and that they had accumulated information about Lacson’s connections with the drug cartels in Hong Kong and China.
They said that the Chinese smuggle ethyl phenyl acetate into the Philippines where it is then used in the making of the methamphetamine drug popularly known as shabu. “When he was PNP Chief, Lacson was the main protector of the Chinese drug cartels,” one DEA agent said.
The officers shared their concern that if Lacson were to ever be elected president of the Philippines, he would turn the country into a “narco state”, like Colombia. It would mean Filipinos would be regularly searched at US airports for being potential drug mules as Colombian tourists to the US are regularly subjected to.
This explained to me why Lacson did not use his pork barrel allotment as other senators did during his12 years as senator. He simply did not need it.
I recalled then that less than a year before, in June of 2002, three Philippine Senate committees had conducted hearings on Lacson’s involvement in drug trafficking and other crimes. Among the witnesses who testified under oath wasMary “Rosebud” Ong, an undercover PNP officer who described how the PNP underGen. Lacson had become a “revolving door” where drugs seized on any given day were out back in the streets the following day.
THE 14K TRIAD
Rosebud accused Lacson of working with and for the “14K”, the largest and most violent of the HongKong-based triad societies engaged in large-scale drug trafficking. It was founded by 14 members of the Kuomintang in 1945 who then fled to Hong Kong following the victory of the Communists in 1949. In HK, they engaged in large-scale drug trafficking. As the 14K triad grew, it expanded into mainland China; where its members regularly cross from HK to avoid police security.
After hearing the testimonies of Rosebud and other witnesses, the three senate committees drafted a joint 100 page report (Senate Committee Report No. 66) whose release Sen. Lacson later succeeded in blocking. “Sen. Panfilo Lacson on Tuesday succeeded in blocking the adoption of Senate Committee Report No. 66 which recommended that he be indicted for the capital offense of kidnapping, drug trafficking, smuggling and summary executions.” (“Lacson Blocks Senate Inquiry Report About Him” Philippine DailyInquirer, August 6, 2003).
In blocking the senate report, Lacson was aided by Sen. Loren Legarda, then Senate majority floor leader. PhilippineDaily Inquirer Columnist Belinda Olivares-Cunanan explained her motive. “Current talk is that Legarda has not acted on it (Report 66) in order to protect Lacson,who has invited her to be his running mate.” (“Let’s have that report”, June 25, 2003).
PAPER FAN: THE SEARCH FOR THE TRIAD MOBSTER
During this same time period,Canadian journalist Terry Gould arrived in the Philippines in search of Steven Wong,a Chinese mobster who was arrested in Vancouver, Canada in 1992 for masterminding a heroin conspiracy. While out on bail awaiting trial where he faced a possible 20 year sentence, Wong succeeded in convincing a Vancouver judge to give him his passport. The next time Wong was in the local news, his parents were weeping over a cemetery plot in Vancouver insisting to the press that Wong had been killed in an accident in the Philippines. They readily produced an “official death certificate” from the Philippines to prove it.
The Canadian authorities never believed that Wong actually died and Gould made it his personal mission to search for Wong, an investigation which he chronicled in a book, “Paper Fan:The Hunt for Triad Gangster Steven Wong”, (Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York,2004).
His search for Wong brought Gould to the Philippines where he met with Sen. Lacson, a meeting which is described in several chapters of his book. In fact, the website of the book, http://terrygould.com/paper-fan.html, carries this description:
“At one critical point, the former chief of the Philippine National Police, Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson, was working closely with Gould, and seemed to be the key to finally nabbing Wong. A failed revolution backed by Lacson interrupted the hunt and once again Wong slipped away, or perhaps Lacson was only going through the motions of catching Wong. According to a Philippine Senate investigation Gould recounts in Paper Fan, Lacson may not have been the crusader against organized crime and corruption he claimed to be, but up to his eyeballs with the 14K.”
Lacson’s purported connection“up to his eyeballs with the 14K” may explain how Lacson was able to successfully elude capture while hiding out in Hong Kong from December 2009 until March 2011after an arrest warrant was issued for him for the murder of Salvador “Bubby”Dacer and Emmanuel Corbito.
THE SCOURGE OF SHABU
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has identified the Philippines as one of the world's leading methamphetamine producers, and a major exporter of the illegal party drug to the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. (Asian Pacific Post, January 10, 2010)
The UNODC noted in its 314 page report that the Philippines ranked only behind China and the United States, which have considerably larger populations, in the number of meth seizures within its borders. The report noted that while many countries manufactured shabu, China, Burma and the Philippines accounted for most of the production over the past decade.
“Easy to make, cheap to buy, and highly addictive, the Philippines is now dealing with its own meth scourge as shabu---the Philippine name for crystal meth---reportedly the new drug of choice of over 90 per cent of Filipino drug users, from college dorms to rural farms.,” the UNODC report added.
Before Pres. Aquino was swornin as president on July 1, 2010, John “Boboy” Shinn III, author of “Shabu inAmerica”, expressed his “fervent hope that the Philippine government---under the administration of President Noynoy Aquino--- will take the country's illegal drug problem just as seriously as the problems of insurgency and poverty he will face at the start of his six-year term… because it threatens to destroy not only the lives of our nation's future, but also the very moral fiber of our society as a nation.”
I am sorry, Mr. Shinn, that Pres. Aquino did not heed your advice to take the country’s illegal drug problem as seriously as any of our other top problems. If Pres. Aquino had any real concern about dealing with our drug problem, he would not appointed Dracula to be in charge of the blood bank?
(Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com or mail them to the Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 or call 415.334.7800).
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