Anak ng jueteng!

"Anak ng jueteng!" is how the people react whenever they hear stories about the P13-billion-a-year illegal lottery system. In the past seven years, the Philippine National Police has arrested 183,067 bet collectors and 1,840 operators, but only 7,180 cases actually reached court. The problem is that it is always the low men on the totem pole that are arrested and very few of the cases actually reached court.

Jueteng will be wiped out of the country when the top people responsible for its existence are first, exposed, then charged in court and convicted. The best collectors are just pawns. One of the problems here is that some people like to accuse very prominent names as being the top jueteng lords but they do not provide any evidence. So their accusation is reduced to nothing but name-calling.

An accused is presumed innocent till proven guilty. We prefer having no presumption. If a person is accused, the accuser should present his evidence in court and the accused should not be presume innocent or guilty. That is what the trial is all about. That is something that the courts will decide.

What we would really like to see are the top operators being prosecuted in court. Definitely, it would include top PNP and other prominent government officials. No less a personage then Archbishop Oscar Cruz has openly and publicly declared that he has eight witnesses who are ready to identify persons who have higher positions than congressmen who are the top men responsible for the mass existence of jueteng in the country. The government should pick up this challenge and conduct an honest to goodness investigation of this illegal numbers game that is definitely a great stumbling block to the progress of the country. Let the chips fall where they may. The only thing fairness demands is that if the accusers fail to present evidence that will be accepted in court, then, they should be charged for maligning people. Definitely, big names are behind jueteng. The problem is to identify them, and have the evidence to convict them in court.

A Pampanga Mayor, Tirso Lacanilao of Apalit was quoted in The STAR as saying receiving between P150,000 to P200,000 from jueteng payoff every month and he accused his co-mayors of hypocricy when they issued a resolution backing Malacañang’s campaign against jueteng. Worst, he now wants jueteng to be legalized. Can elected government officials publicly admit that they were on the take on an illegal numbers game and not be subject to prosecution? Isn’t it the job and duty of all mayors to eradicate jueteng in their towns? How can they do this if they are great beneficiaries of jueteng? Mayor Lacanilao himself said that his salary as mayor is only P22,000 a month but he receives P150,000 to P200,000 monthly from the jueteng operators.

Has the jueteng problem reach the extent that mayors can now openly brag that they are jueteng beneficiaries?