Pangasinan’s shabu supply

HE interception of a floating shabu laboratory off Subic Bay last July 11 was largely deemed insignificant by the national police and media because the police raiders found the vessel empty. Not even a gram of shabu was found.

That interception, however, actually provided the answer and validation to what has been long rumored but never validated by the police and the coast guard here – that fishing vessels in Dagupan City and Bolinao have been picking up large drums containing shabu off the Lingayen Gulf regularly.

Without a doubt, that floating shabu lab has been the source of shabu supply that earned for Dagupan City and Bolinao town the notoriety as the most seriously drug-affected villages not only in Pangasinan but in Northern and Central Luzon.

In Dagupan City, Pantal residents have been whispering loudly about the fishing vessels owned by their barangay officials as the transshipment vessels for the shabu bound for drug syndicates operated by barangay officials of Bonuan districts in the city.

The police intelligence network already confirmed that the fishing vessel came from Hong Kong, entered the country through Cagayan, and later sailed to Ilocos, then Pangasinan, until it was monitored entering Subic Bay. It is now up to PDEA, the Pangasinan provincial, Dagupan City and Bolinao Police to lend credence to that intelligence report.

 

Rule of law

CHINA refused to join proceedings when, in 2013, the Philippines challenged China’s territorial claims of both the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal off the South China Sea.

Last Tuesday, July 12, the UNCLOS’s (UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea) Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague sided with the Philippines, saying “China has no historic rights to its claimed ‘nine-dash line’” that practically gives China total ownership of the strategic South China Sea.

But China said it “does not accept and does not recognize the ruling…it is null and void and has no binding force.”

Can we blame China, which did not recognize the case even before the Philippines elevated it to the UNCLOS three years ago?

Yes, of course.  China cannot escape responsibility because the verdict proved that China’s territorial claims were wrong from the start.

China may be the world’s second biggest superpower after the US.  And we are but Third World.  However, the rule of law recognizes neither smallness nor bigness.  It’s there for world peace, for brotherhood, and, yes, for mankind’s survival.

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