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BY GLENDA SOLOGASTOA
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Wednesday, October 25, 2017
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ILOILO City – The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) Region 6’s list of drug suspects in this city included barangay officials classified as high-value targets.
PDEA bared the list to Acting Mayor Jose Espinosa III during a closed-door meeting of the City Peace and Order Council (CPOC) on Monday.
Espinosa declined to make public the identity of the barangay officials. He told reporters the list was undergoing further verification.
“I told them as a lawyer that there must be due process,” said Espinosa. It was his first time to preside the CPOC meeting as acting mayor.
The barangay officials must be given a chance to defend themselves from drug allegations, said Espinosa, who started exercising the full function of city mayor – including the control and supervision of the police – on Oct. 11 after Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog extended his leave of absence to Oct. 30.
PDEA is now the sole law enforcement body tasked to conduct anti-illegal drug operations. In a memorandum early this month, President Rodrigo Duterte directed the Philippine National Police, National Bureau of Investigation, Armed Forces of the Philippines, Bureau of Customs and all other agencies or ad hoc antidrug task forces to stop conducting anti-illegal drug operations and leave the job to PDEA.
Espinosa also revealed that eight of the city’s 180 barangays were considered “severely affected” by illegal drugs. He declined to name these villages but did not explain why.
The acting mayor, however, identified six villages classified as free from illegal drugs – Libertad-Santa Isabel in Jaro district; Banuyao in La Paz district; and San Jose, Ed Ganzon, Sampaguita, and Osmeña in the City Proper.
There were four more, said Espinosa.
This was not the first time PDEA had disclosed that its drug watch list included barangay officials. Last year, the Liga ng mga Barangay (LNB) Iloilo City chapter even challenged the agency to name the barangay captains involved.
“They must be named. A sweeping accusation is unfair to those not involved in drug trafficking,” said Barangay Captain Reyland Hervias, Liga president, in an interview late last year.
According to PDEA, some barangay officials were merely pretending to be supportive of the campaign against illegal drugs.
These officials were either drug users or pushers, or coddlers of drug traffickers, it said.
Iloilo City has 180 barangay captains.
Hervias did not discount the possibility that some barangay officials may indeed be into illegal drugs. But he said it would be an injustice to the innocent ones if PDEA won’t identify those involved.
PDEA did not say how many were into illegal drugs. Some, it said, were “indirectly” involved through relatives; they were not reproving their erring kin and excluded them in their Barangay Anti-Drug Abuse Council list of drug personalities./PN
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