Vizcaya bishop bares third jueteng bribery attempt

AGLIPAY, Quirino — Bayombong Bishop Ramon Villena lashed out at jueteng operators for underestimating his conviction against the illegal numbers game by persistently courting his approval of and his silence on the issue.

"Stop coming to me and insulting a servant of the Lord. You’re only wasting my time. I’ll never yield to your whims, even for the color of money," the feisty bishop quoted himself as telling emissaries of a jueteng lord recently.

"I let you inside the sanctuary of my home because I treated you as human beings. But this time I will no longer treat you as such," Villena added.

Villena, in a dialogue with local officials last Monday, revealed that jueteng operators tried, for the third time, to bribe him in exchange for his silence on the resurgence of the illegal numbers game in Nueva Vizcaya.

"I will never give in to the whims of these jueteng lords even if (they) take my life," he said.

The bribery attempt, he said, occurred last week right inside his residence in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya, the seat of the diocese that also covers Quirino.

Last year, Villena admitted that three people, who claimed to be emissaries of suspected jueteng lord Rodolfo "Bong" Pineda, offered him P50 million in exchange for his silence on the then rampant jueteng operations in Nueva Vizcaya.

The second bribery attempt occurred when the same people offered to finance the construction of the P5-million diocesan seminary here.

In the latest bribery try, Villena disclosed, the emissaries were not the same people who earlier had tried to buy his silence on jueteng. "These new faces claimed they came from Northern Luzon," he said.

The bishop, however, declined to identify the alleged jueteng kingpin behind the third bribery attempt. "But I know him from the very start," he said.

Earlier, Villena sought Quirino Rep. Junie Cua’s help in eradicating jueteng operations here. "Please do something about this. You’re in a position to personally attend to the matter, given your influence in local politics," the bishop told the solon in a letter.

Apparently stung by the admonition, Cua asked Superintendent Rodolfo Tutaan, provincial police chief, to once and for all carry out a serious drive against jueteng.