PDEA posts gains in anti-graft campaign

MANILA, Philippines - The campaign of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) to eliminate and prevent corruption in its ranks posted gains on all fronts in 2008.

Maj. Roy Anthony Derilo, PDEA director for plans and operations, said the agency registered a 21-percent rise in the number of convictions to 6,649 in 2008 from only 5,492 in 2007, completed the training of 250 new drug enforcement officers, and criminally charged two police colonels, five DEOs and 19 police witnesses.

Derilo said the PDEA also institutionalized internal controls in procurement, computerized the monitoring of all field operations and legal processes, and significantly improved the delivery of its frontline services through automation.

Citing the financial, professional and technical assistance of the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC), Derilo said PDEA can now boast of 355 organic DEOs, unlike before when most of its agents were borrowed from other law enforcement agencies.

“Being merely assigned to PDEA temporarily, many of those agents were naturally vulnerable to corruption. But after a thorough internal cleansing process initiated by Director General Dionisio Santiago and the establishment of our PDEA Academy through the help of the PAGC, we now have our homegrown DEOs who have been fully trained to resist corruption and adhere to the highest standards of public service,” Derilo said.

The next batch of 195 DEOs will graduate from the PDEA Academy next month and 200 others will start training in April.

PAGC funds PDEA’s recruitment, training and other anti-graft programs ultimately covering more than 600 DEOs.

PAGC’s support for PDEA began in 2006, which incidentally was the year Santiago took over the leadership of the anti-narcotics agency. 

“At that time, PDEA was suffering from lack of credibility and capability, which were inter-related and directly linked to corruption because ‘drugs inherently breeds graft.’ So we lacked credibility because our people then were indiscriminately perceived as either corrupt or corruptible,” Derilo said.

“But after booting out and criminally charging all the undesirables, including the police witnesses who deliberately bungled drug cases, our image began to favorably change. Yet our reforms didn’t stop there. Director General Santiago immediately began PDEA’s capability building, all strategically aligned with PAGC’s Integrity Development Action Plan,” he added.