Estrada pushes legalization of jueteng anew

Ousted President Joseph Estrada asked Congress yesterday to legalize jueteng, the illegal numbers game that caused his downfall from the presidency in 2001.

In a telephone interview, Estrada said jueteng  is not a high stakes game like casino, horse racing, cockfighting and lotto.

“I maintain my position that jueteng has to be legalized,” he said.

“The money that belongs to the poor must be given to the poor. The workers of jueteng, like kubrador, are poor. High stakes gambling like the casino is a threat to society because it caused the family, which is the basic unit of society, to be broken. Lotto is a foreign (form of) gambling. Why doesn’t the government run after it?”

Estrada said he was convicted of plunder based on the  P200 million alleged jueteng money deposited to the account of the Muslim Youth Foundation, which he had set up for the education of poor Muslim students.

“The Muslim Youth Foundation was created and has benefited many of our Muslim countrymen,” he said.

“I was convicted on the basis that the P200 million jueteng money went to this foundation. I am not even a beneficiary of that.”

Estrada chided the Catholic Church for its “hypocrisy” in opposing the legalization of jueteng.

“A Church leader said that as long as the money is given them, it doesn’t matter where it came from,” he said.

In his court testimony, former Ilocos Sur governor Luis “Chavit” Singson, the government’s star witness, said Estrada was the “lord of all jueteng  lords.”

When he was president, Estrada tried to replace jueteng with the  Bingo 2-Ball as a game of chance. – Jose Rodel Clapano