i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

SHEILA S. CORONEL
NO TWO presidents
could be
more unlike each
other. She is a
workaholic with a
PhD in economics.
He is a college
dropout and a movie actor
who gets up at noon. She is most
comfortable speaking in English
and spouting economic jargon.
He grunts rather than speaks, and
when he does, he prefers Tagalog
of the kanto
boy variety. But
then he has a natural charm and
is effortlessly popular; his mass
appeal is undeniable.
She, on the other hand, is
charisma challenged. While
he acts like one of the boys,
she behaves like an unpopular
schoolmarm. Low on mass appeal,
she projects herself as a
skilled, hands-on executive, an
image attractive to the middle
class and the business community,
but otherwise unappealing
to the skeptical masa.
In terms of style, personality,
career track, and even linguistic
preference, no two presidents
could be more different from
each other than Gloria Macapagal-
Arroyo and her predecessor Joseph
Estrada. But there is one thing that
they have in common: jueteng.
The scandals that have rocked
both their governments involve the
illicit numbers game, and no matter
what they do, they will never live
down their association with it.
Nearly four years ago, Ilocos
Sur Gov. Luis ‘Chavit’ Singson
told a stunned nation that Erap
was the “lord of all jueteng
lords,” setting off street protests
and a compromised impeachment
trial that led to the president’s
ouster. Today Arroyo is
also facing impeachment, accused,
among other things, of
using jueteng money to bankroll
her campaign and to bribe election
officials.
One would think that history
would not repeat itself so crudely,
or so soon. But then a closer look
at history reveals the deep roots
that jueteng has in Philippine
social and political life. Jueteng
thrives in the murky underworld
where crime, politics, and poverty
meet. It lives in the spaces where
the rule of law is weak, where
those who hold power are in the
thrall of illicit money and wealth,
and where the poor are made
complicit in the structures that
keep them powerless.
Today we have, by all appearances,
a very modern president,
a Georgetown classmate of
Bill Clinton who comports herself
more like a technocrat than a politician.
But the reality is that our
politics has deep, feudal roots
and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is
as immersed in the sleazy world
of traditional Philippine politics
as her predecessor was. Despite
the talk of reform and the ability
to appeal to the urban middle
class and the globalizing sectors
of the business community, she
has done little to yank the political
system out of its feudal roots.
It now looks that she is as trapo
as they come. Like Estrada, she
is anak ng jueteng, the child of
a political system as tired and as
old as that illicit numbers game.
Jueteng therefore is at least
100 years old. Its language alone
betrays its age. The word itself is
Chinese, deriving from the characters
hue
(flower) and
eng
(to
bet). But because the game was
probably introduced by Chinese
traders during the Spanish colonial
era, its vocabulary is in Spanish:
cabo
for the chief collector,
cobradores
for the bet collectors,
cobranza for the collection.
Jueteng’s links to local politics
is probably as old. In 1929, for
example, Mariano Arroyo, then
the governor of Iloilo and the
most powerful man in the province,
was accused of coddling a
Chinese jueteng lord and of operating
a gambling den himself in
order to raise money for the 1931
VERY OLD AND VERY
LUCRATIVE
The first jurisprudence on jueteng,
says lawyer Sonny Pulgar, dates
back to 1905, when a U.S. judge
in the Philippine Supreme Court
upheld a lower court’s decision
that found two individuals guilty
of “unlawful gambling” in Malabon.
The tribunal upheld the
sentences: a fine of 625 pesetas
and imprisonment of two months
for the owner and “banker” of
the gambling establishment and a
325-peseta fine and a prison term
of one month and a day for the
woman caught betting there.
2 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT