A House leader on Tuesday batted for the creation of a special unit tasked to rescue ship in distress and board vessels suspected of carrying contraband.
Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers said the unit should come from the Armed Forces, the National Police and anti-drug enforcement agencies.
The eastern seaboard covers the coastlines of Cagayan, Isabela, Samar, Sorsogon and Albay where international drug syndicates supposedly offload their cargoes from vessels.
Barbers, chairman of the House committee on dangerous drugs, made the proposal in the wake of a congressional hearing on the smuggling of the P79 million worth of cocaine in Isabela.
During the hearing, Navy and police officials admitted that securing the eastern seaboard, with its thousands of kilometers of shoreline, is a difficult task.
They lamented the fact that there is no single agency tasked to implement security measures in the areas.
“There is no Navy, Coast Guard, PDEA [Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency] or police Maritime Group unit dedicated to secure the eastern seaboard,” Barbers said.
“The Navy said there should be at least 3,000 men present or patrolling the area. But we have none,” he added.
Barbers pointed out that Jin Ming No. 16, the vessel suspected of offloading the cocaine in Isabela, left Hainan, China, for Chile on Dec. 12, 2017.
However, it was later monitored to be in the waters in Pambujan, Northern Samar, early January this year. Nine members of the crew were on board at that time.
“We learned that Jin Ming No. 16, a considerably large ship formerly registered in Taiwan and sold years ago to Togo, West Africa, was sailing with fake documentation and was manned only by nine Chinese personnel before it ran aground in Northern Samar allegedly due to Typhoon Agaton,” Barbers said.
This, he said, means that Jin Ming 16 is out of line, similar to a passenger jeepney with a Pasig-Quiapo franchise route but is caught loading and offloading passengers in Quezon City.
“What is more suspicious or considered as a red flag is that the Jin Ming 16, according to Navy officials, shut off its AIS [Automatic Identification System] when it entered Philippine waters,” Barbers said.
AIS is a terrestrial or satellite data gathering system that provides information about the location, identification and other critical data of vessels that are required to attach onboard tracking devices.
Any international drug syndicate which wants to dump drugs in the eastern seaboard – either for local consumption for transshipment– will not be detected due to the absence of patrols, and by just turning off the AIS, Barbers noted. “These international drug syndicates, with their continuing skills and innovation, could have thoroughly studied the local situation to avoid being caught by local authorities.”
“We should find a solution to this problem before the situation gets worse.”