There are now a total of 620 Filipinos detained in different countries for drug trafficking, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) said Tuesday.

PDEA said it hopes to forge more and better cooperation with foreign countries to crack down on drug syndicates and put a stop to using Filipinos as drug mules.

PDEA Director General Dionisio Santiago and other officials of the agency of the Task Force on Drug Couriers met Tuesday at the PDEA headquarters with the embassy representatives of five countries.

These countries include Brazil, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Peru where Filipino drug couriers were reported.

Santiago explained that the countries they met Tuesday have “no international cooperation yet” with the Philippines.

With the meeting, the PDEA chief hopes to solve that problem as he stressed that international cooperation was needed to fight illegal drugs.

“Hopefully we will eventually come up with a memorandum of agreement with each of these countries,” he said.

Santiago said that the Philippine government also intends to expand this cooperation with Iran and other Middle East countries.

“The biggest victims have been Filipinos. We are worried and we want to stop it,” he said.

Major Ferdinand Marcelino, director of PDEA’s Special Enforcement Service (SES), said that as of May this year 620 Filipinos, mostly women, are detained in different countries because of drug trafficking.

Marcelino noted that 295 are detained in Asia; 84 in Africa and the Middle East; 120 in the Americas, and 121 in Europe.

The PDEA official added that China had the most number of Filipinos detained because of drug trafficking.