Was President Duterte trying to turn PH into a narco-state?
First word
THE story coming out of the hard-hitting and explosive quad committee hearings of the House of Representatives is profoundly disturbing and wrenching. It boggles the mind and sends your teeth gnashing to contemplate what President Rodrigo Duterte may covertly have been doing during his six-year term in addition to kowtowing to China and selling out our sovereign rights in the South China Sea.
In his own twisted way, President Duterte was doing his level best to be a visionary and transformational leader.
He had his own aspirational vision for our nation. He wanted to turn our Philippines into a narco-state that would be capable of taking itself and supporting its 118 million population through the profits, and business and gross domestic product from trading in illegal drugs.
Or so, one theory goes.
What is a narco-state
According to Wikipedia, "[N]arco-state (also narco-capitalism or narco-economy) is a political and economic term applied to countries where all legitimate institutions become penetrated by the power and wealth of the illegal drug trade. The term was first used to describe Bolivia following the 1980 coup of Luis García Meza, which was seen to be primarily financed with the help of narcotics traffickers.
The overall description would consist of illegal organizations that either produce, ship or sell drugs and hold a grip on the legitimate institutions through force, bribery or blackmail. This situation can arise in different forms. For instance, Colombia, where drug lord Pablo Escobar ran the Medellín cartel (named after his birthplace) during most of the 1970s and 1980s, producing and trafficking cocaine to the United States. Escobar managed to take over control of most of the police forces in Medellín and surrounding areas through bribery and coercion, allowing him to expand his drug trafficking business.
Currently, scholars argue that the term "narco-state" is oversimplified because of the underlying networks running the drug trafficking organizations. For example, the Guadalajara cartel in Mexico, led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who managed to combine several small drug trafficking families into one overarching cartel controlling the marijuana production in the rural areas of Mexico while trafficking Colombian cocaine to the US at the same time.
Over time, the cocaine market expanded to Europe, leading to new routes being discovered from Colombia through Brazil or Venezuela and Western Africa. These new routes proved to be more profitable and successful than shipping from North America and turned African states such as Nigeria, Ghana and (later on) Guinea-Bissau into actual narco-states.
It has been argued that narco-states can be divided into five categories depending on their level of dependence on the narcotics trade and the threat the narcotics trade in said country poses to domestic and international stability. These five categories are (in ascending order): incipient, developing, serious, critical and advanced.
Revelations
Between the two hearings that are being simultaneously carried out by the Senate and the House, it must be said that the House quad committee (four committees working in tandem) hearings are by far the more substantive and explosive. It has succeeded in getting as resource persons individuals and personages who were undoubtedly engaged in the nefarious activities they testify about.
The revelations drawn by the questioning sound almost like a movie about the underworld.
Harrowing
Taken altogether, the testimonies and revelations of the resource persons add up cumulatively to a harrowing portrait of the Rodrigo Duterte presidency and the former first family.
First, customs intelligence officer Jaime Guvan testified on the confiscation in 2018 of a P6.4-billion shabu importation that was allowed to pass through by the Bureau of Customs, and which was allegedly passed because the consignees were Duterte son, Paulo; son-in-law and spouse of the vice president, Mans Carpio; and presidential adviser Michael Yang.
Guvan also named journalists who allegedly acted as intermediaries for the shipment through customs. He named no less than the current president of the National Press Club and its former president who was a Duterte undersecretary.
A second witness, Lt. Col. Jovie Espenido, who was involved in DU30's highly publicized war on drugs, testified on direct orders from the top during the drug war.
He declared that the Philippine National Police (PNP) was "the biggest crime group in the country." Police officers and commanders, not civilian government officials, were thoroughly involved in the antidrug campaign.
Antidrug campaign
He said the previous Duterte administration established a quota and reward system based on every drug personality killed, and as incentive for the police to carry out killings.
Espenido explicitly tagged former PNP chief, now senator, Ronald de la Rosa, as ordering him to kill drug suspects.
He also named Sen. Christopher "Bong" Go as involved in facilitating funding for the reward system for the drug war.
Espenido claimed that the main sources of funding were the small-town lottery and the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) online gambling casinos, which President Duterte allowed to enter the country.
While everyone explicitly named in the testimonies were quick to issue denials of involvement in the illegal scheme, the general picture that began to emerge was extremely grim. Experts and analysts began to piece together an intriguing theory about who was the brains or mastermind behind the web of the illegal drug trade, the POGOs, human trafficking and the widespread killings of drug suspects.
Increasingly, the finger of suspicion pointed to President Duterte as the alleged real brains and mastermind of the web of criminal activities, killings and proliferation of Chinese criminal suspects in the country.
One theory, prominently discussed in social media, is that President Duterte had an ostensible grand plan to take over as the biggest drug lord in our country of 18 million people. To take over, he sought to eliminate all big drug lords. This was the principal reason why he immediately launched the drug war upon his accession to the presidency.
Duterte supposedly began his move by taking over the drug trade in Davao City and nearby provinces. Chinese drug suspects, who were in custody in the Davao penal farm, were ordered killed. This was one of the missions that was spilled by Guvan at the House hearings.
Meanwhile, the Chinese triads, which were extremely disturbed by the elimination of their business in the Philippines, moved to thwart the plot to exclude them from the country. Accordingly, they moved to expose some illegal drug shipments into the country, one of these being the P6.4-billion shabu drug shipment allegedly ordered by Paolo Duterte, Mans Carpio and Michael Yang. It has been confirmed that Filipino authorities were tipped off by the triads about the shipment.
The picture that emerges is a totally crooked and evil plot to turn the country into a narco-state, like some of the unfortunate countries in South America.
As a central part of the scheme, candidate Rodrigo Duterte presented himself to the nation as a crusader against illegal drugs. Immediately upon accession, he ordered the implementation of the war on drugs. And he tapped the PNP and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency as the principal implementers of the antidrug campaign.
To carry out the plan and regale the nation, according to the theory, Duterte started parading lists of PNP generals and officers who were allegedly in the payroll of top drug lords in the country.
He also named local government officials, including governors and mayors, as involved big time in the illegal drug trade.
To dramatize the seriousness of the war, he ordered the killing of drug suspects. This was the immediate reason for the extrajudicial killings that made the drug war so repugnant and evil. It took the lives of many innocents.
While posturing as a crusader and avenging angel against illegal drugs, was Duterte banking on establishing himself as the drug kingpin in the country?
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