We wonder whose bright idea it was to release a list from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) containing the names of barangay officials allegedly involved in illegal narcotics.
Some may justify the publicizing of the list as a means for voters to discern for whom they should vote come May 14, when they select the chairman and members of the barangay councils.
But since a list is — like any other list — just a list that has no legal substance absent of due process of law, such a justification smacks of gross naivete.
It was not too long ago when the mayoral aspirants of Cebu City exchanged accusations and counter-accusations of involvement with drug syndicates — an exchange that came to naught, amounting to nothing more than campaign period catfight that found no substantiation in court.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson is right. If the government is serious in its fight against drugs, it has, in releasing the PDEA list crippled itself by alerting drug suspects that they are under surveillance.
If haling suspects to court, securing their conviction and getting them incarcerated becomes more difficult from now on, officials who released the list have only themselves to thank.
It is also true that the PDEA’s release of the list has also opened the agency to the filing of libel cases from persons in the list whose feeling aggrieved and maligned rises to the level of being litigious.
Chief Justice Maria Lourdes P. A. Sereno had courteously reminded President Rodrigo Duterte at the beginning of his term to leave to the judiciary the disciplining of persons cited in his list of narco-judges in order to respect their right to due process as well as the separation of the branches of government.
To recall, that list had proven unreliable.
Some people named were no longer in service, already deceased, or not judges at all.
Similarly, the unreliability of the PDEA list has been pointed out on the heels of its dissemination. Barangay officials have questioned their inclusion in it.
It is now the word of the agents against the word of the accused.
Does that help in voter discernment?
It does not.
It only increases mistrust of PDEA and mistrust of barangay officials while imposing the latter to unfair judgments or the possibility of physical harm from vigilantes.
Can the PDEA ensure that no life will be endangered or lost based on a list that has no judicial verification?
Can they protect people who are now vulnerable to being portrayed as guilty via their liquidation?
Without having made a dent in the crackdown against illegal drugs, the list will, in the coming days, keep the attention of voters on the drug issue and marginalize issues like health, sanitation, child care, peace and order, traffic, ecology and others that ordinary fill the plate of barangay aspirants who stand on the frontlines of government service.
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