Lifestyle gives away village chief’s other life as drug dealer
CEBU CITY—Village chief Epifania Alvizo receives a monthly honorarium of only P3,500 but she owns a bungalow and at least three cars.
The lifestyle flaunted by Alvizo, village chair of Malabago in Badian town in southwestern Cebu province, triggered suspicion among the police and antinarcotics agents on the legitimacy of her source of income.
Police said Alvizo started accumulating property while her husband, Marieto, was serving time at New Bilibid Prison for kidnapping a Cebuano businessman in 1998.
“It has even become a joke here in Badian that it’s better to be jailed at Bilibid because one can end up rich,” Senior Insp. Bonifacio Pareja, police chief of Badian, said in Cebuano.
Alvizo eventually entered politics and was elected barangay chair. Her son, Kempee, was also elected first councilor in the village.
Other life
After three months of surveillance, authorities discovered Alvizo’s source of wealth: illegal drugs.
Agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) in Central Visayas conducted on Wednesday separate buy-bust operations against Alvizo and her cohort, Ronan Librando, where P2.1 million worth of “shabu” (crystal meth) were recovered.
PDEA agents arrested Librando, 46, after handing over P1,000 worth of shabu to an undercover agent in his house at Sitio Cabil-isan, Barangay Banhigan at 4:30 a.m.
Yogi Filemon Ruiz, PDEA regional director, said two packs of shabu with an estimated market value of P601,000 were also seized from the suspect.
A separate PDEA team arrested Alvizo, 52, in her house while she was selling a pack of shabu, worth P150,000, to a PDEA agent who acted as a buyer.
The Badian police, which took part in the raid, searched the village chief’s house and found a package containing suspected shabu worth P1.5 million.
Also recovered in the house were three ATM cards and four bank books.
Ruiz said the transactions in the bank books indicated that Alvizo was a part of a drug syndicate and that the illegal activities had been going on for a long time.
Ruiz declined to say the exact amount in the bank accounts but noted that this ran into millions of pesos.
He said Alvizo was a “Level 2” drug pusher who was capable of selling at least a kilogram of shabu a week.
Most of the suspect’s clients were habal-habal (motorcycle-for-hire) drivers.
Ruiz said Alvizo’s arrest was part of the PDEA’s campaign to track down government officials involved in illegal drug activities.
“There are still several suspected narcopoliticians in our list, and one by one, we will catch them,” Ruiz said. —CALVIN D. CORDOVA, JHUNNEX NAPALLACAN AND ADOR VINCENT MAYOL
