Four dead, and City Hall showed up two days late

Four people are dead because of PHP 1,500 worth of shabu. Not a turf war between drug lords. A neighborhood dispute between two families in Barangay San Isidro, La Paz – over a transaction so small it would barely cover dinner for two.

The buyer paid, the product never came because police had purportedly arrested the supplier’s source days earlier, and by Saturday night, four men lay dead on the pavement. A 68-year-old father and two sons on one side. A 33-year-old former Tokhang surrenderer on the other.

What makes this worse is how unsurprising it feels. Shabu has become so embedded in certain Iloilo City communities that a PHP 1,500 deal can happen between next-door neighbors with the familiarity of borrowing rice. Provido went back to the Muya house three times that night, drunk and demanding delivery, the way someone might chase a late food order. That is someone treating methamphetamine like a commodity on tap.

Here is the part City Hall needs to reckon with. Just 13 days before this bloodbath, on March 8, police conducted a buy-bust in the very same barangay and seized PHP 1.53 million worth of shabu from two high-value individuals. San Isidro was already on the radar. Yet the downstream network — the small-time peddlers, the buyers entangled in the retail end – kept moving, unmonitored, until a broken deal turned lethal.

Mayor Raisa Treñas did not say a word until Monday – 48 hours after the Saturday night killings, after the story had gone national. Her statement expressed disappointment and reminded the public that the city does not tolerate drugs. Four bodies and two days of silence tell a different story. It is hard not to wonder whether City Hall hesitated for fear of reviving the “shabulized” label that Duterte pinned on Iloilo in 2016. If so, political self-preservation came at the cost of public trust.

Such self-preservation is even more imperative when the current administration has been blaming a past ally for the city’s drug woes. What did they say? Don’t start throwing rocks when you live in a shiny glass house.

The mayor has staked her credibility on numbers. As of December last year, 112 of Iloilo City’s 180 barangays had been declared drug-cleared – 68 remain uncleared, and yet City Hall is targeting full clearance by year’s end.

The La Paz stabbing exposes the gap between certification and ground truth. Tyrone Muya completed the Community Based Rehabilitation Program and still lived in a household where shabu was being peddled through his sister’s partner. Barangay Captain Felicitas Hortillosa herself admitted that drug transactions had become a “trend” in San Isidro.

Colonel Wilbert Parilla’s response followed the usual script: condemnation, investigation, more police visibility, more demand reduction. The same measures already in place before four people died. What’s missing is what happens after a supply-side bust. Arrest the source, and the retail network doesn’t vanish – it destabilizes. If police cannot follow a major operation with downstream monitoring, they create the very volatility that led to the La Paz massacre.

At some point, City Hall has to ask itself whether declaring barangays drug-free actually makes them drug-free – or just makes the spreadsheet look better.

Four men are dead over PHP 1,500. The paperwork said things were getting better. The bloodied pavement said otherwise.