In his privilege speech at the regular session of the city council, Councilor Joseph “PG” Ponce exposed the alleged dirty secrets of the city’s underbelly largely due to the apathy of the Angeles City Entertainment Promotions Office (ACEPO) which “seemed to tolerate the illegal activities by their inaction.”
Ponce said he had a personal experience of the rampant prostitution involving minors and other seemingly illegal activities which abound on the streets in Fields Avenue after accompanying a friend from Manila who went for a visit here.
Fields Avenue has gained notoriety abroad over the years for its exotic honky-tonk joints, as well as girlie and hosto in foreign men’s magazines as “where one can have sex for a price of a hamburger.”
Ponce said he conducted a discreet investigation where he discovered that three out of five girls he interviewed on the street were minors aged 17 years old and below. Most of these girls said they are employed as “masseur (sic) therapists” but don’t have any place to render their services other than motel or hotel rooms of their customers. These girls were even dressed as masseuses, he added.
Transvestites, hookers and pimps freely walk the streets soliciting and hawking their illegal activities to just anybody they perceived as customers.
He said anyone can purchase Viagra or Cialis pills from cigarette vendors who are also mostly minors. “With this kind of set-up, it’s not farfetched if they are also peddling illegal drugs,” he feared. “And this is happening right in front of the ACEPO office,” Ponce lamented.
He said he made the expose to save the children and the city’s image, citing its entertainment business as a fast growing industry.
He clarified that he made the expose not to undermine the leadership of Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan but to underscore the importance of crafting guidelines and parameters that can be passed into an ordinance to further regulate the city’s burgeoning entertainment industry.
Ponce won a seat in the city council under President Duterte’s PDP-Laban Party. He is an avid supporter of the president during the campaign and shared a common passion with him for guns and big bike motorcycles when Duterte was still Davao City mayor.
