EDITORIAL - Smuggling made riskier sans English

While the "tanim bala" controversy at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport raged and the embarrassment over it reached international proportions, a Taiwanese national on his way to Taipei from Cebu via Manila was arrested at the Mactan Cebu International Airport, not with a single bullet but with several guns and ammunition hidden in his luggage.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the incident, it is that crime does not pay, especially if you hardly know a word in English. To get on in the world, you have to speak the language that almost everybody does. This is not to cast aspersions on the capability of security personnel at airports everywhere, but had the Taiwanese man been conversant in English, he probably would have tried far better means of escaping detection. Or simply not tried to smuggle anything at all.

As it turned out, the Taiwanese man appeared to have very casually placed the guns and ammo in his luggage, as if he was simply packing personal belongings. He was very clearly unaware he was walking into a virtual minefield. He couldn't have chosen a worse time to attempt doing something silly such as the thing he did. He just did not know everyone was already on the lookout for anything strange in passenger luggages.

And why did the Taiwanese man not know anything? Why do you think he did what he did at the time he did it? The answer, simply, is that he did not understand a word in English. He, therefore, was not aware that the hottest thing on tv and the biggest story in the front pages was the planting of bullets inside the luggages of airline passengers by unscrupulous people at airports in order to extort money from them.

Had the Taiwanese man been conversant in English, he would have amply been warned that if single bullets were being found inside passenger luggages, the more would powerful firearms and large quantities of ammunition not be able to escape security checks at airports. Even in social media, the Taiwanese man would have seen how bullets in passenger luggages have become one of the hottest topics on the Internet and thus make his far bigger cache almost impossible to spirit away.

But because the Taiwanese man speaks no English, he was woefully unaware that airports in the Philippines were on heightened alert for people who precisely had what he had in his bag. The moment he stuffed the firearms and ammunition in his bag and made his way through the airport, it only became a matter of time before he was dead meat.

The moral of the story is, of course, not to do something foolish that you can only regret later. The secondary moral is, it is always better to be conversant in the leading spoken language in the world than not. A person cannot just shut himself out of the hubbub of everyday life, especially if the hubbub is in English, and one is about to embark on something truly crazy.