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OUTSPOKEN Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz alleged Wednesday
that a retired Philippine National Police (PNP) director general is
the operator of “jueteng,” an illegal numbers game, in the whole
province of Pangasinan.
“Totoo ‘yan [That’s true],” Cruz told
reporters at the weekly “No Holds Barred” forum of the National
Press Club of the Philippines.
Cruz said the illegal operation translates to an
estimated daily net earnings of P8 million to P9 million, or some
P270 million a month.
Cruz, founder of the Krusadang Bayan Laban sa
Jueteng, did not identify the former PNP chief who retired years
back.
The prelate said that jueteng is again rampant
in the whole country, particularly in Northern, Central and Southern
Luzon areas, and also in part in the Visayas; while “masiao,”
another form of illegal numbers game, is more popular in Mindanao.
“It’s very, very rampant,” Cruz said, even
as PNP Chief Director Gen. Avelino Razon had given him the assurance
that the whole PNP is one with Krusada’s anti-gambling advocacy.
Asked why jueteng is unstoppable despite PNP’s
support, Cruz explained that it is so because the equation now is
different than it was several years ago.
“Before it was the police who acted as
protector of jueteng and gave money to politicians. Now, it’s the
politicians who are the protectors and give money to the police,”
Cruz said. “Police authorities are afraid of the politicians.”
He added that the much ballyhoed “small town
lottery” or STL, which the government-run Philippine Charity
Sweepstakes Office launched several years ago to stop the operations
of jueteng in the provinces, is a paper tiger.
Cruz said that the majority of STL franchises
are also owned by known jueteng lords in the provinces and likewise
used the existing jueteng structure.
“There is one person, a jueteng lord, owning
as many as 23 STL franchises listed in different corporate names,”
Cruz said.
The influential Catholic Bishops Conference of
the Philippines (CBCP) had come up with strong collective statement
two years ago against STL.
“This is an urgent and ardent plea addressed
to our government officials from the local to the national level. It
is also a straight and strong appeal to private individuals and
corporate entities involved in the same serious moral issue with
socio-political undertones,” CBCP President and Jaro Archbishop
Angel Lagdameo said in behalf of the CBCP.
The STL, according to the CBCP, is no doubt the
“legal cover-up for the illegal numbers of game of jueteng,”
which simply worsened the problem of gambling because the operation
of jueteng now goes side-by-side with STL with the same operators
and collectors and the same poor victims twice exploited.
“STL and jueteng together is legal and illegal
gambling combined. They are a dangerous and insidious pairing,” it
pointed out, adding that as a result, the poor people become poorer
while the gambling operators and payola recipients become twice
enriched.
Likewise, the CBCP, in a pastoral statement
dated March 10,2003, bluntly stated that gambling is a moral and
social cancer. It also said that gambling in the country has become
an insidious subculture of pervasive corruption.
It was followed by a collective policy last
year, wherein the CBCP has directed Church personnel and Church
institutions to refrain from soliciting or receiving funds from
illegal and legal gambling so as not to promote a culture of
gambling.
“Gambling that is organized, widespread and
systemic, whether legal or illegal, is not desirable. It creates a
culture that seriously erodes the moral values of our people,” the
CBCP further said in its collective policy.
-- William B. Depasupil
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