‘Akyat-barko’

Akyat-barko,” in street lingo, refers to persons or the process of boarding commercial vessels docked in Philippine seaports in order to provide paid sexual services to the crew. If the ships are anchored farther asea, say, in Manila Bay, the sex workers are taken there in small fishing boats and hoisted up to the deck where customers await.

If “akyat-bahay” refers to burglarizing homes, akyat-barko is the discomfiting process of getting on board foreign cargo ships in whatever way possible. I knew about such activities when I was doing magazine feature stories related to HIV-AIDS and women who do the unthinkable in order to earn for their impoverished families. Picture it—women in their sexy best clambering up cargo ships anchored in deep waters.

That scenario was in my mind while I was watching the live Senate investigation led by Sen. Risa Hontiveros on how the former mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, Alice Guo (Chinese name: Guo Hua Ping), under investigation for her involvement in the recently suspended Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos) and as a suspected alleged spy for bully nation China, eluded the long arm of the law and fled the country last month.

Removed from her mayoral post for being a Chinese national, falsification of documents, perjury, and other crimes besides, the unbelievably “farm-bred, home-schooled” 38-year-old billionairess Guo, sailed off to parts unknown in Southeast Asia on July 18 or thereabouts in the company of her fake older sister Sheila Guo and Cassandra Ong. Sheila and Cassandra, also both wanted persons, were arrested last week while in a mall in Indonesia and extradited to the Philippines but Alice eluded arrest.

How the three fugitives got there was a story in itself. While all eyes and cameras were on outbound immigration lines in airports, Guo knew better. She took the route less-traveled which is via the sea.

Before the Senate investigation last Tuesday, I already received a tip from a source in Pangasinan that Guo might have left the country by sailing off from a coastal town there. As one version goes, Guo, allegedly with the aid of a politician who provided security, boarded a small boat that took her to a cargo ship that was delivering coal from Indonesia for a local power plant. This cargo ship left the Philippines with Guo on board. There was no mention of companions in her escape. I took the information with a grain of salt.

But at the Senate hearing last Tuesday, Sheila revealed that they were a threesome when they left on board a small boat that took them to a bigger boat then to another boat that landed somewhere in Malaysia as her fraudulently acquired Philippine passport’s immigration stamp showed. What the senators did not ask her about was the kind of ship they sailed on, how long it took for them to reach their destination, who else were on board the ship, the crew, etc. Was it really a coal-carrying cargo ship? If it was, we have another problem—cargo ships with fugitives, contraband goods, and whatever else.

This Sheila Guo succeeded in feigning ignorance and stupidity every step of the way during the Senate hearing. Being an “ate” (fake big sister) to Alice, she must be in her 40s, should be more wide-eyed and circumspect, but according to her she simply followed, not knowing where they were headed. Both her Philippine and Chinese passports were always with Alice the whole time, she said, long before they left the Philippines. Why, she could not answer. (China does not allow dual passports.)

If Alice is the amnesiac (“I do not remember,” not even scenes from her mysterious childhood), Sheila is “hindi ko alam” (I don’t know) to the nth degree. Some questions she refused to answer because, she said, there are pending cases against her. It turned out that Alice and the Sheila are not blood sisters after all—another lie exposed.

With the Philippine archipelago’s porous borders and the Philippine Coast Guard underhanded while some immigration officials look the other way, akyat-barko may prove to be the next best thing for fugitives but for a handsome fee, of course.

As Hontiveros revealed, Alice Guo’s escape made her enablers richer by P200 million. (“Risa: ‘P200-M’ bribe got Guo, siblings out of PH,’ News, 8/28/24.) Time for law enforcers and the shipping industry to look into this operation. Unlike an airplane, a cargo ship has hiding places for fugitives and other criminal elements determined to flee.

Trivia: Southernmost Philippines was where some Filipinos wanted by the Marcos dictatorship began their voyage to freedom and exile. Ah, the stories told long after they had reached their destinations. But the brave souls who helped them had their own cloak-and-dagger stories to tell—hair-raising, suspenseful, hilarious.

Alice Guo doing akyat-barko and sailing into the night from northwest Philippines is another chapter added to the blockbuster spy novel in the making.

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