Southern Mindanao’s socio-economic growth has had its share of threats to its stability. In the case of Davao City, the entry of big-time illegal drugs surfaced just as the city was developing into a metropolitan hub. With the wave of migrants from Luzon, the Visayas, and other regions of Mindanao creating stiff competition among old-timers and new arrivals, the opportunities for lucrative but illegal engagements also rose.
The 2005 discovery of a drug laboratory at Barangay Dumoy, Toril District, raised the bar in the campaign to nip in the bud big-time drug-pushing. In the incident, six foreign nationals, suspected to be Chinese or Taiwanese, were killed by anti-narcotics agents in a dawn raid that yielded a large haul of suspected shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) materials and paraphernalia weighing 76.8 kilos with a street value of over P152 million.
The suspects in the setting-up of the laboratory were eventually meted life and civil liabilities terms by a Davao City regional trial court in 2008. Convicted for the ““manufacturing or delivering equipment, apparatus, and other paraphernalia and main ingredients for dangerous drugs, a violation of Section 10, Article II of Republic Act (RA) 9165 or the Dangerous Drugs Act” were Carlos Sy (alias Carlou Sy), Jong Pilapil (alias Jessie Jones Pilapil), and Jed Sy.
The GMA News stated the trio were “sentenced to suffer individual prison terms of 12 years and one day to 20 years and ordered to pay fines worth P500,000 each” and were also guilty for the manufacture of dangerous drugs, and their main ingredients and essential chemicals, which carried a sentence of “life imprisonment and ordered to pay individual fines worth P5 million.”
Curiously, no one came forward to claim the cadavers which were later disposed by the local funeral parlor in a public cemetery. Nevertheless, this bloody event did not deter drug peddlers in pushing their luck further.
Several years later, authorities recovered illegal drugs stashed in a container van parked inside a compound at Sasa, a stone’s throw from the city’s premier wharf. No one was arrested in the bust, but it warned authorities of the growing menace of illegal drugs in the city.
In 2009, 16 kilograms of cocaine valued at P16 million was found inside a refrigerated van at the Maersk container yard. As a result, six shipping firm employees were charged for illegal possession of prohibited drugs.
On Feb. 21, 2014, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), the state’s drug enforcement arm, raided the coastal barangay (village) of Ilang, in Tibungco area. Twenty-six shanties, homes of informal settlers that were used as drug dens, were searched by police and anti-narcotics agents, resulting in a shootout that led to the killing of seven suspected pushers.
Thirty-six people, including a South Korean, were apprehended inside the so-called “shabu tiangge” (drug market). The raid, which was part of “Coplan Baling” jointly launched by the PDEA and the CIDG (Criminal Investigation and Detection Group), yielded assorted firearms, components for homemade bombs, and 40 sachets of shabu.
Stunned by this turn of events, tough-talking city mayor Rodrigo Duterte offered substantial rewards to those who could provide information leading to the eradication of illegal drugs in his bailiwick. To those who could identify drug users, the bounty was P10,000, while the reward for pinpointing a pusher was an Isuzu Crosswind sports utility vehicle (SUV). Squealing on the location of an illegal drug laboratory was the equivalent of a high-end Mitsubishi Montero.
But the worst has yet to come. On Mar. 22, 2014, again in Tibungco area, the PDEA operatives, through a tip provided by employees of the Japanese firm Sumitomo Fruits Corporation (Sumifru), a banana-exporting firm, discovered twenty-four (24) neatly wrapped cocaine bars taped to the ceiling of a container van. Drug enforcers, after studying the tape marks, assessed that there could have been a total of 65 bars stashed inside it, prompting the mayor to comment that the city has become the new transshipment point of drugs in Asia.
Twenty-seven bars, with an estimated street value of P160 million, were later retrieved after the local chief executive assured those who got a hand on the lost cocaine packs would have no liability if they returned the items. In the end, eight packs would not be recovered.
On Dec. 17, 2015, six months before Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte assumed as the 16th Philippine president, a spirited drug raid with scions of prominent Davao families as targets was launched. But the suspects, mostly residents of the subdivision where the local chief executive was residing, escaped the dragnet.
The raid was part of Oplan ‘One Time, Big-time’ drug searches executed that day, which resulted in the seizure of P3 million worth of marijuana and shabu, the death of two suspects, and the serving of twenty-one search warrants against suspects. The operation was also in line with the police’s Lambat-Sibat campaign.
