Jueteng is back!

Yes, you read me right, jueteng is back in Pangasinan.

This illegal numbers game with supposedly Chinese provenance is doing a great comeback. In Urdaneta City, in my own barangay, it is an open secret that it is everywhere. Kubradors, one or two of them are my uncles, are going from house to house, from one street to the next to collect bets from a network of relatives and friends.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against it. But if the government says it has stamped out jueteng not only from the province but in other localities as well, then how come it is back as if nothing happened.

Records of these jueteng operators and their cohorts are with the police. It would be easy for them to do surveillance and check these people one by one if they are back in the business. One only needs to ask a common tao, then loads of information can be gathered. The only conclusion that can be said is that jueteng is back because someone gave the go signal. Somebody allowed it. If you ask me who he is, I don’t know but ask the police, surely they know.

A prize-winning film, Kubrador, had recently depicted the culture at work in jueteng. It is a game of cat and mouse between operators and kubradors, and the police. Actress Gina Pareño who portrayed the central role of an aged mother as the bet collector did a wonderful job. When I first saw this indie movie at UP, I was positive it could win awards and unsurprisingly it did from abroad. It made me more sympathetic to the plight of these bet collectors, victims of unemployment and poverty in the country.

If it is a national policy to eliminate jueteng, then it should never be selective. It must be done without prejudice or favor to certain personalities or groups. The government must also provide livelihood to these ordinary people whose daily sustenance depends on jueteng.

Actually, jueteng provides jobs to people. Usually bet collectors are in their mid-forties to sixties who are unemployed. If one of their bettors wins, they will get percentage from the winning or what we call balato. An operator can employ more than ten kubradors and I am speaking of more than one operator in Urdaneta and in the whole of Pangasinan. The police, I am very certain, know this.

No doubt jueteng is a big business, which brings us to an alternative. If it is a big business, then it is practical and pragmatic for local government units to require them to pay taxes by demanding them to register as legal operators of a gambling enterprise. PAGCOR and LGUs should sort out the ways they can cooperate in this matter. In other words, let us legalize jueteng. The Church will definitely protest but my uncles and I don’t care. [email me at dissentpdn@gmail.com]

[First published in People's Digest Newsweekly (Dagupan City) (August 28-September 3, 2007)]