Bamban’s Mysterious Mayor – by John Berthelsen

It seemed like a heartwarming, only-in-the-Philippines story. Small-town love child of a pig farmer and his Filipina maid who never went to school raises herself up, vastly expands the pig farm, acquires a helicopter and a Ford Explorer and a swimming pool and a wine cellar, and runs successfully as an independent to become mayor of a sleepy town in Tarlac, 100 km north of Manila. Tarlac is the redoubt of the Aquino family, which has produced a powerful political machine that has spawned two presidents, a vice governor and several congressmen and senators as well as the national martyr, Benigno S. ‘Ninoy’ Aquino, who was assassinated in 1983 as he sought to lead a reform movement to oust the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

But Alice Leal Guo may be another kind of Filipino story. She has been the focus of Senate hearings in Manila since earlier this month trying – somewhat ineffectively – to prove she is who she says she is against allegations that she may be an illegal Chinese migrant, or even a spy.

She may be what she says she is. But the Philippine Department of Interior and Local Government has removed her control over local police, citing her alleged “ties with criminals.” Lawmakers have described her answers as opaque and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has raised questions, saying in Tagalog, “I know all the politicians from Tarlac, no one knows her. So, we are wondering where she came from? We don’t know. That’s why an investigation is really needed.”

She came from nowhere to be elected mayor of Bamban, population 79,000, in June of 2022. Although she is 38, she apparently didn’t register to vote until 2021, only a year before she ran and won as mayor. Under questioning in legislative hearings, she said she hadn’t been born in a hospital but rather in a house, hadn’t gone to school but was rather home-schooled, hadn’t registered her birth certificate until she was 17, couldn’t remember the name of her home school organization and could name only one of her teachers and doesn’t even know who her mother was. There are a few Filipinos of Chinese heritage named Guo.

Although she said her father is Filipino, in business records, he was identified as Chinese. She shakes her head in apparent confusion to a long list of questions about her background and identity although she speaks fluent Tagalog with no foreign accent. She was ashamed of being illegitimate, she said, so she largely stayed inside the pig farm compound.

“I had no friends. I had no playmates. I grew up hidden in our farm,” she told lawmakers. But as she grew into her late teens, she said she got involved in her father’s business. She said she would buy corn from nearby Tarlac towns to make hog feed.

“It’s hard to believe Bamban Mayor Alice Guo, when her answer to our questions is always ‘I don’t know’ and she can’t even remember where she lived,” Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian told local reporters.

But the reason for the mystery may lie in a raid by authorities on property that she was linked to – Hongsheng Gaming Technology Incorporated and Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated. Hongsheng was raided in February 2023 and was replaced by Zun Yuan in the same location. It was then again raided in March 2024 for charges of alleged human trafficking and serious illegal detention. In them, police found a vast online casino, called a Philippine Offshore Gambling Operator, or POGO, which catered to online gamblers in China, and rescued nearly 700 workers, including 202 Chinese nationals and 73 other foreigners who were forced to pose as online lovers.

Similar facilities have been found in Cambodia and Myanmar, estimated to employ as many as 75,000 to 250,000 people, many against their will, and run by organized crime figures, mostly Chinese. They have increasingly been chased out of Cambodia and the border regions between China and Myanmar as Chinese Supreme Leader Xi Jinping, angered by the lawlessness, exploitation, and damage to China’s reputation, has ordered them closed.

In Alice Guo’s case, there is a more disturbing concern. Two of the incorporators of Guo’s company Baofu Land Development, the compound where the Pogo firms were located, are Chinese national Zhang Ruijin, who was convicted in April for money laundering in Singapore. Lin Baoying, who carries a Dominican passport, is also facing charges in Singapore. Guo is also listed as an incorporator in the company, along with Filipino national Rachel Joan Malonzo Carreon and Cypriot national Zhiyang Huang.

Zhang and Lin were implicated in a money-laundering ring broken up last August by Singapore authorities, who said it was the biggest such case in their history, seizing seized assets totaling more than S$2.8 billion (US$2 billion) including 152 properties and 62 vehicles in Singapore with a total value of more than S$1.24 billion and bank accounts containing more than S$1.45 billion. On August 15, police arrested nine men and one woman, all originating from Fujian province in China, in a case that left Singapore authorities scrambling to determine how to turn off the ability of foreign nationals to push billions through the financial system without detection.

Guo denied knowing about her partners’ background, telling lawmakers today (May 22) that she had only learned about their criminal records through social media posts by a lawmaker the day before by checking them out on the Internet

Although Guo was found to have owned half of the land under the POGO, housed in long rows of buildings just behind her office, she told lawmakers she sold the property, which according to videos on local TV contained a grocery, warehouse, swimming pool, and even a wine cellar. As with the property, Guo says she sold her helicopter and Ford Expedition registered under her name long ago. She told lawmakers that she was “not a coddler, not a protector of POGOs.” She hasn’t commented on the spying allegations and has largely avoided media interviews since her appearance at the Senate last week and this week.

But as Asia Sentinel reported last October, Asia’s poorest nations with the weakest governance – Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and the Philippines – have been used by renegade Chinese as a harbor for illegal offshore betting and related cyber-scam and sex work industries posing as Belt and Road enterprises. The Asian Racing Federation and the Mekong Club, an NGO that combats human trafficking, issued an explosive report estimating the combined profits from online illegal betting and related cyber fraud and trafficking are in the region of US$40 billion to US$100 billion a year in these four Southeast Asian nations.

“Trafficking in persons connected to casinos and scam operations run by organized crime has mushroomed across Southeast Asia,” Jeremy Douglas, UN Office on Drugs and Crime Regional Representative to Southeast Asia and the Pacific told Asia Sentinel. “There is an urgent need for regional cooperation to address these increasingly integrated and interlinked crimes in the region, as well as the ecosystem they exist in.”

Tens of thousands of people are being held in modern slavery conditions to work in organized illegal betting and cyber-scam operations across Southeast Asia. These operations, which are run by individuals with long histories of involvement in illegal betting and organized crime across Asia, are estimated to make at least US$40 billion to US$100 billion a year in illicit profits from such activity,” said the report of the Asian Racing Federation and the Mekong Club. Some individuals are recruited on false job advertisements, have their passports removed, and are kept in dormitories attached to casinos as forced labor to promote illegal betting websites and engage in industrial-scale cyber-fraud such as “pig butchering,” romance scams and cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes, the report explained.

Workers are typically not permitted to leave without paying large ransoms to their captors and can be sold and traded between organized crime groups, the report said. “Reports on victim testimony and online video show the enslaved workers being beaten with iron bars, shocked with cattle prods, tied up, and subjected to other forms of torture. Female victims have been forced into sex work for failing to meet targets.”

Pia Oberoi, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Senior Advisor on Migration and Human Rights in Asia Pacific said this problem is “unfolding in locations where regulation is weak,” such as conflict-affected border areas in Myanmar, “with little to no rule of law” and in “laxly regulated jurisdictions such as special economic zones in Laos PDR and Cambodia.”