A single spark, a prairie fire

Marcoleta, a former party-list lawmaker who became senator only in 2025, had also become the most articulate non-Marcos voice on corruption as chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and a key ally of Vice President Sara Duterte. He was removed as head of that committee when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s minions on June 3 took control of the Senate with 13 votes, just one vote more from the bloc headed by Alan Peter Cayetano.

Not only that, Marcoleta, in just a year as senator, has demonstrated to tower in intellectual capacity and eloquence way above his colleagues in the Senate. He is one of just four attorneys in the 24-member Senate, a worrying situation in a chamber that drafts laws. If Duterte is banned for running for the presidency in 2028, Marcoleta would be the shoo-in for the post, so he now becomes the Marcos gang’s second target for political assassination.

To further see what’s really obvious: the Ombudsman is far, far unlike the United States district attorney offices, which are roughly the equivalent of the Ombudsman with the Justice Department. These have 35,120 attorneys and 44,150 full-time non-attorney staff. How many attorneys does our Ombudsman have together with the prosecutorial staff of the Justice department? Fifty. Yes, 50, with each lawyer handling at least 300 cases.

The Ombudsman is, in fact, currently investigating 200 individuals accused of involvement in the horrific flood control scam, most fingered by the participants themselves, such as officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways.

Yet Remulla moved to invent the plunder case against Marcoleta despite the massive protest against such an abomination, claiming “nobody is above the law.” He is hallucinating or plainly lying, as his obvious aim is not to uphold the law, but simply to put Marcoleta in jail, as plunder charges are non-bailable.

Field

But a spark alone does not ignite a prairie. The field has to be dry first.

The ground had been drying out for a long time — three years under Marcos of accumulating disgust over corruption stories that the ruling bloc kept trying to smother. The so‑called Independent Commission for Infrastructure went through the motions, but delivered nothing of consequence, despite the public expectation that it would finally lay bare how flood control and public-works funds had become one of the fattest feeding troughs in government. What people got instead of a housecleaning was hedging, delays and bureaucratic fog.

Then Orly Guteza walked into the Senate to throw his grenade. The former Marine said he had served in the security team of former Ako Bicol party-list lawmaker Zaldy Co and personally hauled suitcases of cash to the homes of high-ranking officials. In any serious anti-corruption campaign, that kind of testimony should have blown the doors off. Then-Senate Blue Ribbon panel chairman Panfilo Lacson, instead of probing the scheme, probed Guteza, ordering a full background check on him and spotlight an allegedly falsified affidavit, not to press the trail of money he was pointing at.

When a larger group of 18 former soldiers emerged months later to corroborate Guteza’s account, the establishment filed libel suits against them. The former soldiers, with a number of Marines among them, publicly confirmed in sworn affidavits that they had served as staff of Co, who was one of the three masterminds of the flood control corruption. They backed the allegation that cash-filled suitcases were delivered to top officials. Yet the National Bureau of Investigation appeared less interested in testing the truth of these claims than in demolishing the men making them. In June, it dismissed the allegations as hearsay and lacking proof, and described the testimonies as a coordinated narrative rather than independent witnesses. Lacson refused to investigate the allegations, claiming “new evidence” was needed.

That is how the prairie dried: not by one event, but by repeated episodes in which the public is taught that corruption allegations against the powerful will be managed, diluted and finally buried. A citizenry can endure many disappointments, but when institutions appear more zealous in discrediting whistleblowers than in examining the crimes they allege, anger accumulates like tinder.

The INC rallies erupted in precisely that atmosphere. The INC itself framed the mobilization not merely as support for one of its members, but as a protest against “selective justice,” warning that even if Marcoleta were imprisoned, they would not stop demanding justice. Marcoleta’s supporters saw the Ombudsman’s move not as anti-corruption enforcement, but as legal hocus-pocus: private campaign donations transformed into “ill-gotten wealth,” and from there into plunder, a non-bailable offense.

Marcoleta

That is the spark. It is not merely that Marcoleta is an INC member. It is that millions of Filipinos were asked to accept an obvious lie: that undeclared private donations can be magically reclassified into the stuff of plunder, while far graver allegations involving public money, middlemen, contractors and suitcases of cash continue to drift in procedural limbo. (a sentence deleted here)

This is why the INC rallies cannot be dismissed as a “sect” simply circling the wagons around a favored son. The INC statement itself linked Marcoleta’s case to a wider demand for transparency, accountability, justice and peace, and cast the issue as one of fairness in the application of the law. The crowd on EDSA and elsewhere was, therefore, not just about one senator. It was about a growing recognition that the state has one standard for its enemies and another for its own.

Naturally, the Marcos propaganda corps I described on Monday moved with unusual speed, obviously ordered by their master not to waste a minute to put down the INC rallies.

The most sickening attempt to badmouth the INC rallies was made by the so-called Yellows and Pinks: the Liberal Party, Sen. Risa Hontiveros, and Ronald Llamas’ Akbayan and their associates that have been presenting themselves as crusaders for justice.* In a statement titled “On the use of EDSA to shield political accountability,” issued right after the first day of the INC rally, it claimed “strong opposition to the INC gathering a the People Power Monument in support of Marcoleta amid the serious allegations relating to his reported failure to declare P75 million in campaign contributions.” This itself reveals that even before studying the issue, Akbayan and its allies issued the condemnation, following the Marcos script, a confirmation of the fact that these are members of the Marcos propaganda corps.

Ombudsman Remulla’s allegation is not that Marcoleta failed to declare P75 million in campaign contributions — an allegation that itself falls flat on its face, as the Commission on Elections had already cleared the senator in March 2026, pointing out that nondisclosure of campaign contributions is no longer a criminal offense under Section 39 of Republic Act 7166.

Remulla’s absurd allegation is that because Marcoleta was a sitting House representative at the time he received the donations, they constituted bribes in exchange for official acts — a theory that transforms a campaign finance compliance issue into a plunder charge.

Media

One line of attack by the Yellow- and even Marcos-controlled mainstream media was to reduce the crowd to disorder and “chaos,” with front-page news reports emphasizing road closures and traffic paralysis rather than the grievance that brought thousands to EDSA before dawn. If that argument were valid, EDSA I that toppled Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and EDSA II that kicked out Joseph Estrada would not have happened.

Yet another line was to insist that the whole thing was solely about Marcoleta, thereby missing — or pretending to miss — the reason one man’s case resonated far beyond one man.

The editorial in this paper, while calling for Remulla’s resignation, called the rallyists numbering at least 50,000 a “mob,” then lectured the country about democratic norms. A columnist in this paper called the rallies a “weaponization of religion” for the sake of one man, forgetting or ignorant that the INC, because of the solidity of its organization and its moral principles, have called in the past for demonstrations affecting the public. It already undertook in 2025 two huge rallies implicitly expressing its anger over the Marcos administration’s corruption. The INC rallies was not just to shield Marcoleta, but to protest the Marcos administration’s clampdown on those who are exposing its corruption.

The 1986 EDSA revolt was not about shielding the mutineers Gen. Fidel Ramos and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile from the elder Marcos’ wrath, nor was it make Cory Aquino president. They were the sparks that started the fire in the prairie of 13 years of corruption under the Marcos dictatorship. A similar fire is likely to consume his son’s regime.

*This shameless statement was attributed, other than Akbayan, to the Liberal Party, Tindig Pilipinas, Fr. Robert Reyes, Fr. Flavie Villanueva, Mamamayang Liberal Party-list, Magdalo Para sa Pilipino Party-List, 1Sambayan, Akbayan Youth Alyansa ng Samahang Pantao, Alyansa Tigil Mina, ATOM (August Twenty-One Movement), Beatus Circle, Buhay ang People Power Campaign Network, Democracy Watch Philippines, Manindigan, Pandayan para sa Sosyalistang Pilipinas, Partido Manggagawa, the Student Council Alliance of the Philippines and several other obscure nongovernmental organizations. Remember them who pretend to be crusaders for democracy, but have now sold their souls to Marcos.

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

The post A single spark, a prairie fire first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

A single spark, a prairie fire
Source: Breaking News PH