Fifty-four years since Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared martial law, the nation is governed once more by a Marcos who has proven that the family’s defining trait was never merely authoritarianism. It was impunity: the conviction that public office is private property, and that no institution will ever make them answer for what they take.
The father’s method was crude and total. Martial law gave him the courts, the military, and the press to seize with. The son’s method is more sophisticated but no less total. IBON Foundation’s reading of the Makabayan bloc’s impeachment complaint describes how, from 2022 to 2025, flood control projects worth ₱545.6 billion were funneled through a “deliberate, top-down system of plunder,” the so-called Baselined-Balanced-Managed “allocables” formula that determined which congressmen and contractors received funds, and which kickbacks followed. Investigators tied to the scandal say more than 9,855 flood-control projects worth over US$9.5 billion were undertaken in just the first three years of this administration, many of them “ghost” projects that existed on paper while the floods they were meant to stop kept killing and displacing Filipinos.
Different decade, different paperwork, same architecture: public funds engineered from the top to enrich those who hold power. And impunity followed both, on schedule.
The impeachment complaint against Marcos Jr. over the flood control scandal was dismissed by a House of allies in February 2026, a dismissal described as one that “shields the President from accountability” and “subverts the people’s right to the truth.” Cabinet officials resign, mid-level contractors are arrested, but the system that made the plunder possible, and the officials at its apex, remain untouched. This is what impunity looks like when it has learned to wear a suit instead of a uniform: not the absence of investigation, but the guarantee that investigation stops exactly where power begins.
The cost of this impunity is paid in economic, social, and cultural rights the state has sworn to protect. IBON’s own labor force analysis finds total employment falling by half a million between February and June 2026 alone, with underemployment climbing to a four-year high. Farmers marking the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas’ (KMP) fortieth year note that 72% of them owned no land at all between 2012 and 2022, even as land conversion for commercial and industrial use expanded under the current administration’s infrastructure program. Public health funds fared no better: the Supreme Court ruled in December 2025 that the 2024 transfer of ₱89.9 billion in PhilHealth reserves to the national treasury was unconstitutional, ordering the money returned. Housing fared no better either: Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (KADAMAY) declared the administration “guilty of systemic corruption resulting in homelessness,” pointing to a housing backlog of 6.5 million now projected to reach 22 million by 2040. And the national debt has climbed past ₱19.39 trillion as of July 2026, a 33-year-high debt-to-GDP ratio of 66%. Every peso funneled into an allocable scheme or a “ghost” flood-control project is a peso not spent on the wages, health care, land, and housing millions of Filipinos are still waiting on, decades after the dictatorship promised the same prosperity Bagong Pilipinas promises today.
The Council for People’s Development and Governance holds that the persistence of this system, across two Marcos presidencies and everyone in between, is proof that accountability was never truly pursued after 1986. The Marcoses were allowed to return, keep their fortune, and rebuild their political machinery because impunity was never dismantled, only interrupted. We call on Filipinos to reject the notion that Marcos Jr. represents any rupture from his father’s rule. We call for the recovery of what has been stolen, in the 1970s and in the 2020s alike, and for an accountability that no dismissed impeachment complaint or resigned undersecretary can substitute for.
Impunity survives only for as long as the people allow it, and fifty-four years is long enough. #
#NeverAgain #NeverForget #EndImpunity #JustPeacePH #SDG16 #PeopleEconomics