Mabalacat: Drug City Africanized

 

JUST LAST March 25, appeared here a compilation of drug busts within the first quarter of 2021 in the city which LGU shares a common acronym with its hizzoner, MCG: Mabalacat City Government and Mayor Crisostomo Garbo.

(Google https://punto.com.ph/mabalacat-drug-city/ if interested.) Anyways, that piece is summarized thus:

Mabalacat City yielding a haul of over P10 million in drugs in less than three months – and that’s only what has been reported in mainstream media. Just the major hits that passed the muster of public interest. How much more so with the misses – like the proverbial big fishes that always manage to get away?

No garbled thoughts now, but it does not have to take ace police reporter Jess Malabanan – anyone who has covered the police beat for long will do — to get this sense that Mabalacat City has reclaimed its title of being the “Drug Capital of Pampanga,” maybe even Central Luzon, that it so infamously held in the 1990s and 2000s.

Yeah, those years when Roxas District in Dau was no man’s land that law enforcers feared to tread.

Yeah, those years when Jopilan Street in Agusu was “scoring avenue” of shabu. The street name taking after the transactional “Jo, pilan?” query for the number of sachets a druggie wished to buy there.

Yay, I thought I just heard someone say: Mabalacat is not only a drug destination. Drugs are the city’s very destiny.

Just as then, so it is now. With an even horrific, if alien, twist. 

2 Nigerians, 4 Filipinos nabbed in Mabalacat City drug ops

So screamed headlines on June 18. 

“Agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency arrested two Nigerians, and four Filipino cohorts, inside a drug den in Barangay Dau…

PDEA-3 director Christian Frivaldo identified the Nigerian nationals as Kingsly Anaelechi 37, of Rosanda St. Samson Ville, Barangay Dau; and Okafor Nelson Jr., 25, of San Rafael, Tarlac City.

The Filipino suspects were identified as April Wright, Eric Desuyo, Norwin Carpio, and Ralph Joseph Yalung, all residents of Mabalacat City.

Confiscated from the suspects were 30 grams of suspected shabu with an estimated value of P204,000; 30 grams of dried marijuana leaves with an estimated value of P3,600; two grams of high-grade marijuana (kush) with an estimated value of P2,000 and assorted drug paraphernalia…”

3 African nationals arrested for drugs, guns in Mabalacat City  

So came an echoing headline on June 29 – 11 days after:  

Operatives of CIDG-Pampanga and the Angeles and Mabalacat police stations arrested three African nationals in an operation at Bagong Lipunan Street, Homesite, Barangay Duquit. 

The subject of the operation, African Enzo Omgba, managed to escape on board a Hyundai Tucson.  

Police arrested his compatriots found at his house. They were identified as Flabien Jerome Noah Omgba, Yves Emmanuel Bidias Wanko, and Prosper Henri Junior Essomba Mbarga. 

Seized from the suspects were a .45 pistol, a .380 handgun, two magazines for .45 pistol, two magazines for .22 gun, assorted live ammo, five plastic sachets of shabu weighing 15 grams, two plastic sachets of dried marijuana weighing five grams, and two plastic sachets containing 45 pieces of suspected Ecstasy pills worth P250,000…

Where drug busts have virtually been at their scarcest in the rest of the province of Pampanga, Mabalacat City has not only stayed its course as drug capital: it has even added some foreign – African, that is – flavor to it of late. 

Who was it who posted in the web of Garbo’s City being a “transshipment point” of drugs? 

By Jove! Who was right. An international transshipment point, at that. Affirmed in the African connection and in the kush and Ecstasy pills, hardly domestic products.