MANILA, Philippines—A young daughter of a government agent involved in fighting drug syndicates was abducted at the weekend and later found drugged and sexually abused in a heinous attack that provoked Malacanang to warn late Sunday night: “This is now a war on drugs.”

The girl, a minor, is “still in shock” and is confined in a hospital, a top government official told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, asking not to be identified because the family had asked him not to talk about the matter with the media.

Press Secretary Cerge Remonde said in a statement that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who appointed herself in January the country’s “anti-drug czar,” had been told of the attack.

“The President has just been informed … We will mobilize all forces to help the family involved,” Remonde said.

Before Malacañang issued its statement, law enforcers said they were looking at a certain drug syndicate supposedly with political connections as the possible perpetrator of the attack.

The Inquirer decided not to identify the agent or the office where he works to protect the family’s identity and the girl’s interest.

A Philippine law on violence against women and children prohibits the publication of any identifying information about the victim or a family member without the family’s consent.

The tragedy that befell the family appears to show how audacious drug syndicates have become in the Philippines, which ranks fifth in the world in terms of shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) seizures in the last 10 years.

Officials have put the value of the illegal drugs trade in the country at a high estimate of P300 billion and a low estimate of P150 billion a year.

The girl’s tragedy also strikes a grim parallel to what has happened in other countries where drug cartels and gangs have turned drug trafficking into a frightful, flourishing business.

In Mexico alone, nearly 10,000 drug traffickers, state agents and civilians have been killed in drug war-related incidents since 2007, the Los Angeles Times has reported. Some victims were beheaded.

‘This is narco-politics’

“Without discounting other suspects, I think this is the handiwork of a drug syndicate which was the subject of a recent crackdown … just by assessing previous incidents following the bust,” the top official told the Inquirer.

He described the syndicate as “well-connected politically.”

“This involves narco-politics. May kalaliman ito (This goes deep) assuming the angle we are pursuing is right. But we’re bent on considering that angle,” the official said.

Another theory is “baka napag tripan ng barkada (a gang might have taken a fancy to the girl) but that is speculative,” an Inquirer source said.

Sketchy reports indicated that the girl went missing on Saturday night. She was recovered at around 6 a.m. Sunday near a military facility in Luzon, the official said.

There had also been a previous, but failed, attempt to abduct the young girl, the official said.

Both the rich and poor

Illegal drugs have become an insidious, pervasive menace in the Philippines, sucking into their vortex both the rich and the poor.

Of the country’s 3.4 million drug users, 1.8 million are regular users while 1.6 million are occasional users, law enforcers said.

The 2009 World Drug Report released by the United Nations recently said the Philippines was fifth after China, the United States, Thailand and Taiwan in terms of shabu seizures from 1998 to 2007.

“The Philippines remains a significant source of high potency crystalline methamphetamine used both domestically and exported to locations in East and Southeast Asia and Oceania,” the report said.

It said that while many countries manufactured shabu, China, Burma (Myanmar) and the Philippines accounted for most of the production.

Foreign chemists

The report noted that the illegal drug was often manufactured in industrial-size laboratories operated by transnational organized crime syndicates and staffed by foreign chemists.

The UN report said that in 2007, a notable increase in the seizure of methamphetamine-related manufacturing facilities in the Philippines was reported with nine significant laboratories and 13 chemical warehouses seized. This rose to 10 laboratories in 2008.

The report identified interregional trafficking routes as being from Burma to Bangladesh and India; from Hong Kong, China, to Australia, Indonesia, Japan and New Zealand; from the Philippines to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States; and from East and Southeast Asia to Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The report said that global markets for cocaine, opiates and cannabis were steady or in decline, while the production and use of synthetic drugs was increasing in the developing world.

Cannabis or marijuana remained the most widely used drug around the world, although estimates were less precise. With a report from Inquirer Research