Fun fact: I think I’m the one that popularized that term, “Floodgate,” although I didn’t invent it. I heard it somewhere and started making it a point to use it in the editorials I write for The Manila Times, and now it is starting to stick. It’s those little instances of being able to move the world, even if just a tiny bit, that keep one motivated.
Anyway, I digress. I’ve had a drink or two (got a really excellent bottle of wine from the boss the other day, I’ll have to find a way to reciprocate for Christmas), it’s rather late on a Friday evening, and my linear thinking skills have taken the night off. Deal with it.
To explain it as simply as possible, Floodgate is a broad web of corruption primarily involving flood-control projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), whereby a small number of favored contractors cornered most of the projects in exchange for kickbacks to DPWH officials, who in turn provided kickbacks to members of Congress as repayment for Congress’ adding huge amounts to unprogrammed allocations for the DPWH in the national budget each year. The actual projects, of course, were either shoddily built or not built at all, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Filipinos affected by floods – which is a top-of-mind, everyday concern here, we’ve had two serious tropical storms just this week – that they otherwise shouldn’t have been.
The amount of money snatched from the public funds is breathtaking. Estimates for the losses due to corruption have been estimated to be between P650 billion and P1 trillion over the last 10 years ($11 billion to $17 billion); testimony in Senate hearings from some of the key players in the DPWH has revealed that between 30 and 70 percent of the budget for individual projects is siphoned off by the various collectors.
So far, the scandal has already rolled a few big heads. The Secretary of the DPWH was the first to go, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Martin Romualdez – first cousin of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. and until all this happened, Marcos’ presumptive successor in 2028 – resigned after being implicated in the scandal, although he remains a member of the House, for now. Just today (Sept. 26), the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) recommended the filing of charges against 21 people, including three current senators, one former senators, two members of the House of Representatives, a former undersecretary of the DPWH, several other DPWH officials, and a handful of contractors and bagmen.
One of the senators facing indictment is Francis “Chiz” Escudero, who was until the end of July the Senate President, but was ousted in a sort of mini-coup within the Senate. At the time, that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Floodgate scandal, but rather the fact that Escudero (who for good measure is married to one of the Philippines’ several hundred identical actresses and “celebrity endorsers,” Heart Evangelista) is kind of a weenie, and made a big mess of the attempt to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte on graft charges stemming from her embezzlement of a couple hundred million pesos in government funds during her short-lived, disastrous stint as Education Secretary. However, there have been somewhat credible rumors that other senators knew or at least suspected Escudero would get snagged in the growing scandal, asked him to step down before that happened to avoid causing an embarrassing political crisis (the Senate President is second in the line of succession, after the Vice President and ahead of the Speaker of the House), and when he refused, saw to his removal by way of new election for the post.
In announcing the recommended indictments, the Department of Justice assured the public that there would be others to follow shortly, after the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. These would include former House Speaker Romualdez, former Senator and now mayor of Makati City, the country’s financial capital, Nancy Binay, several other members of Congress, other officials and employees of the DPWH, and several of the construction firms involved in the mess.
Back to the protests. My personal view was that they were rather strange, because they really didn’t have a clear demand for action other than “stop corruption.” Unlike in Indonesia and Nepal, public anger here is not directed at the government generally, but rather at Congress. President Marcos himself sparked the entire scandal by ranting about the corruption in his State of the Nation Address to Congress at the end of July; he endorsed the protest actions, and has otherwise taken some very visible steps toward addressing the problem, such as forming an independent investigative committee, and appointing his personal fireman, a guy named Vince Dizon, to clean up the mess at DPWH. Dizon responded by immediately firing a long list of DPWH officers and employees, and having the assets of those implicated in the corruption scandal seized or frozen.
Thus, the protests amounted to what they call here “indignation rallies,” just an opportunity for an angry public to blow off some steam. And I suppose that’s fine, but to the outside world watching what is going on, they were in no way indicative of a potential government collapse, at least not yet. There were two main rallies in Metro Manila, one in Luneta Park, the large park in central Manila surrounding the grave and shrine of national hero Jose Rizal, and one centered on the so-called Edsa Shrine not far from where I live. “Edsa” is short for Epifanio D. Santos Avenue, and is Metro Manila’s main drag; it was the site of the famous uprisings that ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos (the current president’s father) in 1986, and the corrupt buffoon Joseph Estrada in 2001. I live along Edsa, in a building about a mile south of where the Edsa Shrine is. It is about the most Filipino location you could imagine; a Catholic church built in 1960’s mod style, featuring a gigantic BVM statue, and located right in front of a mall.
My daughter attended the Luneta Pak rally with some of her friends and classmates, and according to her, the event was surprisingly orderly and peaceful, although she also said the police (who were positioned so as to keep the rallyists contained in the park) were a bit heavy-handed with people trying to break or go around their cordon. Her impression was that they were not very well prepared, nor were there enough of them to do what they intended to do.
Likewise, the Edsa rally, which happened a couple hours later in order to give the Luneta attendees time to travel to it (my daughter considered it, but opted to come home and take a nap instead), was also mostly peaceful, although there was some tension between the rallyists and some supporters of former president Rodrigo Duterte (Vice President Sara is his daughter), who tried to use the occasion to stir up calls for Marcos’ overthrow. One of the key players in this action was close Duterte ally and former governor of Ilocos Sur province Chavit Singson – a political actor so crooked that, in the words of the immortal Hunter S. Thompson, he probably needs the assistance of a personal butler to screw his pants on in the morning. Singson emerged from his residence in the tony Corinthian Gardens subdivision, which borders Edsa a few blocks north of the Edsa Shrine, to try to whip up calls for Marcos’ ouster, only to be shouted down and menaced by nearby rallyists, resulting in his bodyguards quickly hustling him back into the safety of the walled village.
The defeat – mostly verbal, although there were apparently a few punches thrown – of the pro-Duterte agitators was pleasing to see. Former president Rodrigo Duterte, whose stronghold is in the far southern city of Davao, was the worst of the four presidents I have seen so far in the Philippines, a sociopathic thug with the leadership and reasoning skills of a stunned badger. In a controversial move this past March, the government arranged for his extradition to the Netherlands, where he is now jailed awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity stemming from his campaign of state-organized murder against criminals, drug dealers, and those he only thought were criminals and drug dealers, first during his two decades as mayor in Davao, and later as president. His children, primarily Sara, the current Vice President, and son Sebastian, who sports jailhouse tattoos on his neck and is currently the interim mayor of Davao (the elder Duterte was elected mayor, despite being jailed in the Netherlands, by an overwhelming margin this past May), are cut from the same violent, trailer-trash cloth. They are popular – if nothing else, the Philippines demonstrates the truth of the old adage that the weakest link in a democracy is the voters themselves – but they are profoundly corrupt, besides being rather stupid, and the rejection they got from the recent rally was a welcome sign that the Marcos administration’s campaign to bury them and prevent Sara from being elected president in 2028 might be working.
later in the day. A group of several hundred – perhaps as many as 1,000 – protestors attempted to march on Malacañang Palace, the seat of the government, along Mendiola Street, but were blocked by police. A riot ensued, which resulted in at least 95 police personnel being injured, and untold number of civilian injuries, at least 216 people arrested, many of them juveniles, and considerable damage to businesses in the area from firebombs and looting. The back-and-forth battle between rioters and the police went on for hours before calm was restored, and two things were immediately obvious. First, the police were woefully unprepared to handle this sort of situation; and second, the incident was not the result of legitimate protest, but just some people looking to start some shit.
I have to be honest, even though my professional assessment would be to condemn the rioters, my personal sentiments are a bit more forgiving. If I was 30 or 40 years younger, I wouldn’t have been at the organized and well-behaved rallies, I would have been throwing rocks with the bangers. My personal approach to protesting always was, “if you don’t at least flip over a car, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Even so, there needs to be a clear point or call to action for what you’re doing; there needs to be a bigger picture reason for bouncing a rock off a cop’s head, otherwise you’re just being a dick. In this case, there was no point; even though the riot was rather spectacular and caught the attention of the media outside the country, it was what I already said it was, just people (mostly young men) looking to start some shit. There has been a lot of online chatter that the violence was organized, in a way, by pro-Duterte groups – not by the Dutertes themselves, but rather some among their legions of zealous mouth-breathing fans – although this is not entirely certain. My daughter, who is more online than I am (I don’t have Facebook, she does) argued with me that this was fake news; on the other hand, some of my other sources – because I am a spooky journalist who knows everybody and everything – have sworn that it was another attempt, a fortunately rather lame one, by the Duterte forces to sow instability.
***
Sorry, I got distracted for a few minutes discussing the mortal threat of AI with my daughter, who is lamenting the fact that she has to write papers in such a way as to prevent AI detectors for mistaking original work for something AI-generated (she’s a first-year nursing student). My god, what students have to worry about these days. AI is evil and must be destroyed. And if I ever get within arm’s reach of Sam Altman (which is highly unlikely), you better believe I will choke that eyes-too-close-together motherfucker out. For real.
Anyway, back to the main topic. In spite of the attention the riots got, and the somewhat lesser attention the larger rallies attracted, there is no risk, at least right now, of the Philippines going the way of Indonesia or Nepal. To be sure, there are still risks that the government’s “anti-corruption” drive may make a fatal misstep, or that some act of corruption so heinous will be uncovered – for example, if the president himself is implicated, although I don’t think that will happen, because reasons – that public protest of the kind that brings down governments will erupt. But for now, that’s not happening, and news stories that suggest otherwise are speculating too much.
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