EDITORIAL - Our porous borders

Any possibility that the dismissed mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, Alice Guo, is still in the country as claimed by her lawyer has been disproven by the admission of her sister Shiela that she, Alice, and their brother Wesley escaped the country together last month.

Speaking before the Senate hearing yesterday, Shiela Guo said that they were able to enter Malaysia by boat before flying to Singapore to meet their parents. She goes on to say that they parted ways and she doesn’t know where Alice was ultimately headed.

This is the story she is telling now anyway, we don’t know if she will stick to this story or tell a different one later on.

This issue with the POGOs and scam farms is one thing, but this probe into the same raises another one entirely; our porous borders. She said they were able to leave the country without Immigration’s detection by boat.

A landlocked country might have better chances at securing its borders by making use of features like mountain ranges and border walls to funnel human traffic into chokepoints that can be monitored. On the other hand, securing an archipelagic country like ours can be nightmare. Escaping detection, anyone from outside the Philippines can just come in through any of the more than 200 ports we have all over the country. From there they can go God-knows-where.

And this is where our weakness in this regard is exposed. We just don’t have enough Coast Guard personnel to secure the waters that surround our country or screen all boats coming in and out. And we certainly don’t have enough facilities to ensure that Immigration can register whoever comes in or goes out.

We hasten to add that in the past international terrorists have been reported to enter and leave our country this way, totally undetected until they left or were killed in encounters.

We hope that this incident will finally prod authorities to come up with better policies to secure our porous borders. We certainly don’t want fugitives easily coming in and out of our country.