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Thursday, June 02, 2005
Editorial: Jueteng controversy
It has been said that there are times in our lives when certain things may have to grow worse before they start getting better. Perhaps, that is true with nations, too, as it is with people.
At this moment in our history, things appear to be growing worse with our nation’s life, what with the explosive testimony of a witness, reportedly a former jueteng lord, repeating what have been exposed about the numbers game.
Such testimony seems to have the force of a wallop straight to the solar plexus, drawing the nation’s ears to the ground to hear any rumble of a reply.
Hours before the testimony was made in the Senate, President Arroyo had launched what appeared as a defense of her family’s integrity in the face of the flood of insinuations going the rounds throughout the width and breadth of the nation about her son and her husband’s being in the list of beneficiaries of the jueteng monthly payola.
It is now a question of which is more credible between her word and that of the witness.
In his testimony, the witness claimed that he parlayed his modest “business” in his barangay in Daraga, Albay “into a multi-million peso business covering the huge market of Pangasinan and as far north as Benguet.”
Then he said, by way of mea culpa, that jueteng is “a bane of society…The small people are the ones who are victimized…If before there is no cheating in jueteng, today cheating in this numbers game is going on.”
The reason for the recourse to cheating among the financiers and operators is the rising demand of those in the take for more and bigger shares of the money. Sometimes, they would even ask for advances.
The amount given weekly or monthly varied in accordance with the position or rank of the beneficiary in the bureaucratic totem pole of the police or the bureaucracy.
The amount ranges from a mere P10 thousand to half a million pesos or more.
In the face of this reality, whether or not the allegations in the testimony of the former “jueteng lord” and those who are still to testify in the Senate hearing are true, the fact will remain that an epidemic of corruption has swept through the nation and a pall of gloom has settled over the archipelago.
It is time that the republic should undertake a serious soul-searching not only among its national and local leaders who have become like fallen idols to the citizenry, but also among the average citizens whom jueteng have, unknowingly through no fault of their own, long held by the nose.
But the time for recriminations is long passed. “Juetengate” has become part of the nation’s life. Let it become part of our past, and let us start anew.
(June 2, 2005 issue)
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