Marcos firm on eradicating human trafficking —Bersamin

President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. wants to get rid of the scourge of trafficking in persons in the country, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said Friday.

“Matindi ang sinabi ng Pangulo at ang desire niya is matanggal yung trafficking in persons. That is another form of slavery,” Bersamin told reporters in an interview on the sidelines of the meeting of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) in Camp Aguinaldo.

(The statement of the President is strong and his desire is to eradicate trafficking in persons as it is another form of slavery.)

“So the PAOCC has been given this task to run after the criminal committing this trafficking in persons and to rescue the people who were victims of this crime,” he said.

“Medyo masama yan para sa atin (That is quite bad for us),” he added.

Last week, the Philippine National Police-Anti-Cybercrime Group (ACG) rescued some 1,000 people of different nationalities who were allegedly forced to work for cyber fraud in Clark, Pampanga.

Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla on Monday said the government may choose to either deport or file charges against the 12 individuals involved in the alleged human trafficking in Pampanga.

“We have to file the necessary charges against them. The choices now are whether we file charges and we don’t deport or we deport without filing charges, but we cannot have both,” Remulla said.

“We cannot deport people who have charges… but we will strike a good compromise on this so that people will know that we really have to put some people in jail,” he added.

In the past months, authorities also discovered that many Filipinos were offered to work in Thailand as call center agents but they were transported to Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar as a part of a human trafficking scheme.

At least 210 Filipino human trafficking victims have been repatriated from these Southeast Asian countries, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs. —LBG, GMA Integrated News