EDITORIAL - Remember Juancho Mendiola?

Before our hearts start bleeding for the presidential mistresses who are suddenly being hospitalized and even developing tumors, as the administration’s main spin doctor would have us believe, let us not forget the scandal that accompanied the hasty departure last week of Laarni Enriquez.

The woman who is said to be President Estrada’s favorite evaded a subpoena issued by the Senate impeachment court, leaving for New York via Hong Kong ostensibly for a medical checkup in one of the most expensive hospitals in the United States. She will return, promised the top spin doctor whose political career is dead, though he has a promising future as a B-movie scriptwriter. But only after two weeks, when the prosecution would have finished presenting its case. Will she be cited for contempt? Like presidential brother-in-law Raul de Guzman, expect a doctor’s certification to save Enriquez.

Meanwhile, what has happened to the sideshow that called attention to Enriquez’s flight? There was a guy named Juancho Mendiola, remember, who is supposed to be facing charges of technical smuggling after he was caught literally holding the bag – a bag that happened to contain 18 bundles of thousand-peso bills totaling P6 million. Mendiola, who can be presumed to have some brains since he’s a zoology graduate from the University of the Philippines, must have blacked out for several minutes since he could not, for the life of him, recall who handed him the bag shortly before boarding the same flight taken by Enriquez. For this San Juan resident who professes to have a severely impaired memory, the Hong Kong-bound Philippine Airlines flight was delayed for nearly two hours.

How did that bag even get past security checks in the first place? To this day we aren’t even sure how Mendiola got apprehended by alert Customs personnel at the NAIA’s Centennial Terminal II. One version is that he was nabbed at the departure area. Another is that he was already on the plane but was so jittery he attracted the attention of airline personnel, who in turn called airport authorities.

Customs and airport officials have since clammed up on the case. Will they also be needing hospital confinement soon?