Punchline
Jai-teng, the new game in town
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
FOR the uninitiated in the ways of illegal numbers gambling, jueteng was never licked because there was always a convenient legal response front for it. For too long, local government officials and police chiefs thought it was enough to disavow involvement and staged managed arrests of cobradores periodically until they would no longer be believed.
Then came a new brainchild to camouflage jueteng. The small town lottery (STL) was introduced ostensibly to cut the lifeblood of jueteng. The opposite effect was realized, more jueteng draws were held because the cobradores could openly collect jueteng bets as STL collectors. That served the jueteng lords’ purposes until the government officials who benefitted from it could no longer defend STL against charges that it has always been a front for jueteng.
Today, the STL has been withdrawn and the cobradores have donned a new uniform – Meridien Vista Gaming Corporation’s uniform ostensibly for its jai-alai off-fronton betting stations’s operations.
Welcome Jai-teng!
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For the life of me, I cannot fathom how our provincial officials and town officials not see anything unusual and wrong about Meridien Vista’s operations.
Assuming that Meridien Vista’s operation of off-fronton betting stations is legit, the stations are there supposedly to receive jai-alai afficionados’ bets as they would in horse-racing. But Meridien Vista employs “bet collectors” that pound the streets daily to solicit and collect bets for a game that fewer than 1% of the community population understand.
It should be noted that the terms and rules used in jai-alai are in Spanish and the game itself was only popular in Manila where it was played in the 50s-70s. It was stopped for over two decades when the building on Taft Avenue was demolished.
Doesn’t anyone in the province find it strange that collectors would be employed for a game that is hardly known and understood? Only jueteng enjoys mass support in the barangays because it’s all too simple and, therefore, would require a platoon of collectors, as they do for Meridien Vista today. But for jai-alai? Perish the thought.
Jai-teng has certainly given reasons for many provincial officials, mayors and police chiefs to smile 24/7 and still insist that Meridien’s operations are legit.
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NO QUESTIONS ASKED. Then there is the Republic Act No. 7922 (Cagayan Special Economic Zone Act of 1995) which authorizes the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority to grant licenses to private firms to hold jai-alai games in the freeport located in Santa Ana, Cagayan.
How the phrase “Cagayan Economic Zone Authority to grant licenses to private firms to hold jai-alai games in the freeport located in Santa Ana, Cagayan” was stretched to mean it could open and operate off-fronton betting stations, much less to employ “collectors” outside of Cagayan is beyond me. How our local officials and police chiefs readily believed the company’s misrepresentation is even more baffling.
Even if a court had issued a preliminary injunction restraining the Games and Amusement from enforcing its decision to withdraw the privileges of Meridien Vista, the fact remains, RA 7922 has not been amended to allow CEZA to grant licenses to operate off-fronton betting stations across the country. It will be recalled that even the Office of Government-owned and Controlled Corporations (OGCC) already overturned the authorization by CEZA in 2009, giving Meridien Vista free reign to set up betting operations catering to jai-alai, after it determined Meridien Vista had operated outside of its restricted jurisdiction and thus abused its licensing privileges.
This brings us to the point: Why can’t our local officials see through it all? Why do they insist on acting like stupid dumbos? It must either pay a lot to talk and think like one or it doesn’t really take much effort on their part to be one for the kind of money offered them.
What a cheery life our elected officials must lead today simply by acting dumb and not ask questions.
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WHO’S LYING? Somebody is lying to Dagupenos through his teeth.
For weeks now, Dagupan Mayor Benjie Lim oft-repeated his desire to revive his failed sanitary landfill project in San Jacinto. He either knows something that Dagupenos are not aware of or he’s bluffing his way to prove that he had a good deal for the city but other “sectors” derailed his plans.
The last time we looked, former City Legal Officer George Mejia (of the previous Al Fernandez administration) reported to the city that the proprietary claim of the city government over the 31-hectare land in San Jacinto’s Barangay Awai was summarily denied by the regional arbitration board of the Department of Agrarian Reform. Translation: Dagupan has lost the land.
So if Mr. Lim insists the land is still there to be developed, he, in effect, is calling the Fernandez administration a fat liar having misled the city to believe otherwise. But that’s easier said than done. He must perforce show a copy of the decision of DAR to prove him right or shut up and stop misleading Daguenos.
On the other hand, it is incumbent upon the previous administration to prove that it had done its part in attempting to recover the reported lost property by making public the decision of DAR nixing the Fernandez administration’s appeal.
So, let’s cut the chase and expose the liar! Al Fernandez Jr. or Benjie Lim?
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CHARGE THEM! I am afraid Guv Spines, with all his passion to protect and preserve our environment, will end up the object of ridicule by the moneyed sector that continue to make piles of moolah at the expense of the environment and his administration.
And unless the Guv changes his tactics, even his offer to pay whistleblowers will come to naught. For the environment terrorists, their strategy is really very simple yet can cause the Espino administration a lifetime headache – just pay the barangay chiefs, the town environment officer, the mayor, etc. a cheap monthly stipend just to look the other way and do nothing.
Today, each time calamity strikes as a result of negligence on the part of enforcement agencies, the government merely looks into causes but never makes any culpable official accountable.
So I propose that he musters the courage to wield the political will to file administrative and criminal charges against any of the officials under whose jurisdiction a particular area of an environment is damaged if not wasted.
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