Many dramatic twists in Cuadra drug case

Barring last-minute hitches, the arraignment of suspected drug boss Jose Kim Cuadra finally will push through on Feb. 14 in Kalibo, Aklan. The Court of Appeals has denied his petition for review of charges, paving the way for formal trial for possessing and transporting shabu. Filed last year, the motion was the last block to what authorities bill as their long fight to bring Western Visayas’s alleged most notorious gangster to justice.

Cuadra’s case has had many dramatic twists and turns since his arrest by Aklan police on Apr. 22, 2003 at Caticlan airport while about to board a private plane home to Bacolod City. A month ago one of the two arresting officers, Jonathan Moreño, ran amuck during Kalibo’s Ati-Atihan festival, shooting dead the provincial and city police chiefs before himself felled by police fire. The other officer, Gilbert Diaz, disclosed that Moreño was under extreme pressure from two fellow-cops to retract his arrest report in exchange for P500,000. On the day of his rampage, Moreño was supposed to be transferred, at his request, to safer grounds in his Toboso hometown in Negros Oriental.

Moreño’s wife confirmed the bribe offers of October and December, adding that her spouse had feared for his life. At this Cuadra told newsmen he was in no position to assassinate anyone from behind bars. Accused accessory Raymundo Morales, out on P50,000-bail, called Moreño and Diaz "puppets of higher-ups against Cuadra," but didn’t substantiate it. The official report from PNP headquarters in Camp Crame is that Moreño did not turn amok, but indeed went paranoid from pressure.

In late 2003 police intelligence unearthed a plot to rescue Cuadra by the Ilonggo Group that robs banks in Manila. Gang members were spotted assembling at a hut near the Aklan provincial jail in Kalibo, rented by a pal of Cuadra in Bacolod. The plan fizzled out when, sensing a police stakeout, the gang men dispersed.

Also in 2003, days after Cuadra’s arrest, there was confusion on who would prosecute his case. His lawyer sought to inhibit the original fiscal for alleged bias. The provincial office saw no proof of it, but replaced the fiscal just the same for routine rotation. The Aklan police head who had led Cuadra’s arrest in turn sought to bar the provincial fiscal from assigning a new person. The Western Visayas regional state prosecutor replaced the provincial chief with a officer-in-charge who would personally argue the case. Judge Marietta Homena-Valencia will hear it.

Aklan PNP Supt. Nemesio Neron planned the arrest in early April 2003 from intelligence tips that the Cuadra Gang would operate in Boracay resort island during the Holy Week tourist influx. He secured search warrants on suspected drug dens, and arrested five pushers selling four grams of shabu on April 7. Cuadra, Morales and Zaphiro Mendoza (now deceased) flew in a private plane on April 16 and were promptly trailed by operatives. The trio kept on the move, making surveillance difficult. On the 22nd, they were passing through airport departure security when searched by Moreño and Diaz. Found in Cuadra’s pocket was 12 grams of shabu; in Morales’s, glass tubes and aluminum foil. It was proclaimed as the busting of Western Visayas’s biggest drug gang.

In 1998 regional police had arrested Cuadra for possessing shabu and paraphernalia, and an unlicensed pistol with dozens of 9-mm. bullets. A local judge had issued a search warrant on his rooster farm, but the Court of Appeals barred him from hearing the case, on Cuadra’s petition that the raid was improperly conducted.

In October and December 2001, respectively, Cuadra’s brother Julio and uncle Ronnie were arrested by regional police operatives for selling shabu. These came after former narc Remus Garganera denounced the Bacolod City and Negros Occidental police for coddling the Cuadra Gang. In a Senate inquiry of Sept. 2001 on Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s alleged criminal activities, Garganera identified several officers of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force as Cuadra’s protectors. To get to Manila, Garganera had to make a run for the nearest Army camp, eluding assassins from the provincial police unit.

Among the PAOCTF men whom Garganera implicated were its Bacolod chief and several of Lacson’s co-accused in the 1995 Kuratong Baleleng multiple murders. Two of them even stood as wedding sponsors of Cuadra’s son. He said the regional headquarters already had an order of battle of gang members and police protectors as far back as December 2000, but that the city and provincial units did nothing about it.

Then-congressman, now Justice Sec. Raul Gonzalez, had called for an investigation of the Bacolod police. Its top men have since been reassigned, Garganera laments, as higher officials of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, tasked to crush drug syndicates.

Weeks after Julio’s indictment, there was a break-in at the provincial prosecutor’s office. Nothing was taken – except the evidence that was to be used against him.

No more strange twists and turns to the Cuadra case? That leaves to be seen.

* * *

E-mail: [email protected]