EDITORIAL - Naming names

The war against drug trafficking isn’t going to be won by press releases, photo ops and shame campaigns. How many times will this have to be drummed into the heads of the people leading this war?

Yesterday President Arroyo said the government would soon name the most notorious drug barons operating in the country. The President said she had ordered the intelligence community to disclose the names as soon as enough evidence could be gathered against the drug lords and their coddlers. The intelligence community, she added, already had a list of the drug barons and their protectors.

This begs the question: If the drug barons and their coddlers are known, how come they have not been arrested? The answer is clear, and the President herself said as much: there isn’t enough evidence. Without evidence, there is no drug case. If the government publishes the names of these suspects without enough evidence, either the government gets slapped with lawsuits, or the drug barons and their coddlers are sufficiently alerted to stop operations and skip town.

Such an ill-advised directive to the intelligence community betrays presidential impatience with the anti-drug campaign. But the war against drug trafficking cannot be won overnight, unless a president is willing to follow the lead of Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and look the other way when thousands of people are executed in the name of the campaign against drugs. This President Arroyo isn’t willing to do; Filipinos flinch at the site of the first dead bo-dies bearing cardboard signs identifying them as shabu dealers. So the President is stuck with upholding the rule of law in her war against drug trafficking.

This is one campaign that requires infinite patience, meaning it can’t be very useful for election purposes, especially when polls are only a few months away. The best that the President can do is to summon those who drew up that purported list of drug traffickers and ask them: If these drug barons are known, how come they have not been arrested?