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

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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
O V E R V I E W Jueteng keeps the police running as well: police officers use bribes from gambling lords to buy gasoline for their vehicles, office supplies, even medicine for sick cops. In addition, jueteng provides jobs—one estimate is that it employs close to 150,000 people throughout Luzon. Its grassroots base includes millions, many of them poor people who bet P1 or more in a game of chance that has deep roots in popular folklore. In short, jueteng is a parallel government, funding the social services that government, if it were working properly, should be delivering. Jueteng may be the most organized and the most public racket in the country, but it serves a social function, too. For sure, it preys on the poor and keeps them trapped in relationships of patronage, but it also provides them with temporary relief from their misery. Jueteng is not a victimless crime. As the parade of witnesses in the Senate hearings since May have shown, jueteng corrupts, and corrupts absolutely, including possibly even the presidency. TWO OF A KIND? Both the Arroyo and Estrada presidencies have been tainted by their association with illegal gambling. JUETENG elections. Because of exposés that ran in a local paper, Arroyo was investigated and subsequently dismissed from his post. Mariano had a brother, Jose, whose grandson is Jose Miguel Arroyo, the president’s husband. This is by no means unusual. Over the years, the names of politicians who have been linked to jueteng reads like a who’s who of Philippine political families. The names of the Singsons of Ilocos, the Cojuangcos of Tarlac, the Josons of Nueva Ecija, the Villafuertes of Camarines Sur, the Lees of Sorsogon, and the Espinosas of Masbate have all been tainted, whether rightly or wrongly, by jueteng. Some of these families have been accused of protecting illegal gambling operators. Others have been known to operate jueteng networks themselves. Puerto Princesa Mayor Edward Hagedorn, one of the president’s staunchest supporters, is a self-confessed former jueteng big boss. The current Batangas governor, Armand Sanchez, now also an Arroyo loyalist, was on the list of gambling operators who regularly gave Estrada a cut from their collections. More recently, the Lapids of Pampanga—action star Lito, now senator, and his son Mark, the provincial governor—have been linked to illegal gambling as well, not so much as operators but as protectors and beneficiaries of one particularly notorious jueteng lord. In most of Luzon, jueteng is the lifeblood of local politics. It is a source of campaign contributions. During elections, its network of collectors doubles as a campaign machine. It is, more importantly, also a well of money that allows local officials to deliver patronage. A significant cut of jueteng profits passes from the gambling operator to the mayor, congressman, or governor, who in turn doles out some of the money to his or her constituents. For generations, voters have brought their supplications to politicians, who are seen as the local DSWD (Department of Social Welfare and Development). A MULTIBILLION-PESO INDUSTRY In 1995, Rep. Roilo Golez estimated that jueteng was an P18- billion-a-year industry. In 1999, retired Philippine National Police (PNP) Gen. Wilfredo Reotutar put the daily bets placed with jueteng operations in Luzon and the Visayas at P84 million a day, or about P30 billion a year. About a third of this amount—P25 million daily or P9 billion a year—goes to protection money paid to government and police officials, Reotutar reported. In 2001, when Chavit Singson exposed his pal Erap’s jueteng links, the Ilocos Sur politico estimated the total jueteng collections from just 22 Luzon provinces at about P50 million a day or P18 billion a year. Wenceslao Sombero, a retired police colonel who was once chief of the Detective and Special Operations Office of the PNP’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG), estimated that in the post-Estrada era, jueteng had expanded to 27 Luzon provinces, with operators raking in about P75 million in bets a day or about P27 billion a year. This is almost equal the 2004 gross revenues of Fortune PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT 3
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Page 8 and 9: THE TWO FACES OF GMA. Aides say tha
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