A joke that is not funny

It is bad enough that Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency director-general Dionisio Santiago would admit openly that his agents would sometimes plant evidence to corner hard-to-get drug suspects.

It is worse when, days later, after his seat naturally got hotter on account of such a silly admission, Santiago would attempt to rectify his error with another silly proposition — that he was merely joking.

If he was indeed joking, then it was a very bad joke. It was a joke that should not have been made. Planting evidence is not only illegal, as in fact he himself admitted when he made that statement, the consequences of planting evidence are too horrifying to even contemplate.

One can almost get suffocated trying to imagine the courts getting swamped with hundreds of petitions seeking for a review of cases in which drug suspects will be claiming the evidence against them were planted by PDEA agents.

One thing that is clear is that Santiago has said what he said — that PDEA agents sometimes plant evidence in order to catch drug suspects who, otherwise, would have proven to be very elusive.

Santiago did not deny having made the admission during a press conference in Palo, Leyte in which he was a signatory to a memorandum of agreement forged between the government and the private sector in an intensified campaign against illegal drugs.

But in his effort to extricate himself from the controversial hole he has dug himself into, Santiago may have only succeeded in digging an even deeper hole. He has in fact corroborated the story about his admission, only that he was joking the whole time.

On the other hand, there was no way Santiago could have denied making the admission. The direct quotes attributed to him by reporters were too numerous and substantial to dismiss or wave away as something that did not happen. And he thinks we will buy it as a joke?

It would have been easier if he issued only a one-liner. Then perhaps he could claim he was merely misquoted. Or, as he is saying now, that he was only joking. But he could not have been joking or got misquoted when what he said was a mouthful running several paragraphs.

Listen to him and see if he was joking: “We sometimes do this although this is against the law. Definitely we only apply this matter to some cases na ang isang subject ay public knowledge na siya ay nagtutulak ng droga pero hindi nga lang mahuli dahil magaling.

“Pero sinisiguro ng PDEA operatives na hindi malalaman nila na kami ay naglagay ng isang planted evidence. We are doing this because we want to neutralize big personalities engaged in the drug trade na patuloy na sumisira sa kinabukasan ng ating kabataan.”

The subject of his discourse was so serious and he was saying it so seriously that there was no way what he said could be mistaken for a joke. And even granting, for the sake of the argument, that he was joking, then he should have said so right after saying it.

What I believe happened was that Santiago got tactless and said so much more than he should have. Perhaps he also thought that what he said before the provincial press would not find itself into the national consciousness.

But it did. And now he is trying to control the damage. What he apparently does not realize is that the subject of the furor is something that cannot be swept away by some limp alibi like it was all in jest.

The big question now is what the national leadership will do in face of such a brazen admission of a crime by one who is supposed to fight it. Of course we all know that law enforcers are not beyond planting evidence. They do. But they just do not admit it.