Jaguar’s end

Last week, we mentioned how time was running out for Jeffrey “Jaguar” Diaz, whom police in Central Visayas identified as one of the top, if not the top, drug dealer in Region 7.

Well, leave it to Cebu City Mayor-elect Tomas Osmeña to break the news about Diaz’s death due to an encounter with Cebu police at one of the suspected drug lord’s hideouts in Las Pinas at midnight Saturday.

“His (Diaz’s) statement that he was retiring was a lie. Surveillance revealed that he was setting up a new base of operations in Rizal. Cebu exports many things, but we will not export that. Have a great weekend,” Osmeña posted on his Facebook account.

With eight hideouts, Diaz may have been confident enough to postpone his surrender. In fact he was so confident that he had the gall to make his announcement to retire through local media.

Still, the shootout between Diaz and Cebu police that ended with him and his bodyguard Paul Vincent Igloria dead drew questions from netizens who aired suspicions that the shootout was actually a rubout meant to silence him, to prevent him from naming his patrons and his protectors in the police and government.

Outgoing Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama, who had been perceived as wanting in the campaign against illegal drugs, was among those who questioned why Jaguar wasn’t allowed to surrender.

But if the outgoing mayor had been aware of last year’s raid at Diaz’s compound and ordered police to follow it up rather than slack off, then Diaz might be languishing behind bars instead of lying dead on the road.

Then again, when police raided a drug den near City Hall last year, Rama responded by removing the nearby police outpost rather than replacing the errant, negligent police personnel with more proactive police.

Instead, Rama’s former mentor whom he refused to name and who now replaced him had to pick up his slack even before assuming office by offering a cash bounty system that had drawn flak from the Commission on Human Rights (CHR).

Anyone familiar with how the drug trade operates already knows that Jaguar is but one of many heads in the Hydra that is the illegal drug menace. He didn’t survive that long without connections in both the police and government.

Hence the strong public support for an aggressive campaign against illegal drugs that had produced undeniably dramatic results.

Jaguar’s death will serve as a dire warning to drug dealers and their protectors — whoever and wherever they may be — that they will become extinct when President-elect Rodrigo Duterte assumes office unless they surrender with no preconditions whatsoever.