For Immediate Release: KARAPATAN PRESS STATEMENT ON THE 53RD ANNIVERSARY OF MARCOS’ MARTIAL LAW DECLARATION
KARAPATAN Public Information
PRESS STATEMENT
20 September 2025
KARAPATAN PRESS STATEMENT ON THE 53RD ANNIVERSARY OF MARCOS’ MARTIAL LAW DECLARATION
Today, on the 53rd anniversary of the martial law declaration, the Filipino people are starkly reminded of one of the reasons why Ferdinand Marcos Sr. imposed authoritarian rule: to centralize plunder.
As a despot, Marcos Sr. gained the exclusive right to raid government coffers with impunity. He also used his power to seize the assets of his political rivals, in order to transfer their wealth to his own family and cronies.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. wielded his monopoly on political power to enjoy a monopoly on economic power. Some say he lorded it over a kleptocracy. We say he was the top bureaucrat capitalist of his era.
He unleashed the brute force of the military, brazenly exposing how State forces serve as mercenaries and private armies of those in power, to kill, forcibly disappear, torture and imprison those who resist his tyrannical rule, and to quell discontent.
Today, we see the same ill-disguised maneuvers being executed by the dictator’s scion and namesake. Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s “anti-corruption campaign” is driven by the same motivation that propelled his dictator-father’s martial law imposition—to put in place his people who could be trusted to ensure that the billions of pesos in kickbacks from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) are centralized in Malacañang.
Like his father, Marcos Jr. is posing as a self-righteous leader above the fray. But nothing could be farther from the truth. His own upbringing as a billionaire-playboy hobnobbing with the world’s rich and famous was bankrolled by the money his family had plundered. Estimates put the amount the Marcoses had stolen in two decades of power at up to $10 billion.
Throughout the time Marcos Jr. was navigating his way back into Philippine reactionary politics as governor, congressman, senator and eventually, president, never did he acknowledge his family’s thievery, much less express remorse over it. In fact, he plunged right into the same kind of dirty deals his father was involved in and that he now pretends to be innocent of. In 2013, for instance, Janet Lim Napoles testified that Marcos Jr. funneled P205 million worth of his pork barrel funds into four bogus NGOs in exchange for hefty kickbacks.
Today, as president, Marcos Jr. is the author of the kickback-ridden National Expenditure Program (NEP) that includes the anomalous flood control projects. Congressmen then transform the NEP into an equally iniquitous General Appropriations Act complete with trillion-peso insertions and unprogrammed appropriations as their own source of lucre.
As chief executive, Marcos Jr. presides over the departments that implement these graft-ridden projects. Like a mafia boss, he has the biggest take from layer upon layer of corruption.
Marcos Jr.’s “independent commission on infrastructure” is as bogus as the commissions appointed by Marcos Sr. to investigate Ninoy Aquino’s assassination. They may target certain personalities to mollify the people’s anger and even recommend the filing of charges against them. But any targeted bigwigs will eventually be exonerated after protracted proceedings calculated to wait out the public’s indignation, and it is only the small fry who will end up behind bars.
The regime’s PR managers like to raise the hideous prospect of Sara Duterte’s ascension to the presidency to deter an increasingly enraged public from exposing and targeting Marcos Jr. After the gargantuan kickbacks pocketed by the Duterte clique, however, and the exposés of Sara Duterte’s anomalous use of her confidential and intelligence funds, the possibility of another corrupt Duterte at the helm is just as utterly repugnant to the people.
Marcos continues the Duterte legacy of political repression, through a draconian blueprint of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that deflects the root causes of poverty, oppression and exploitation of the Filipino people. Instead of using domestic redress mechanisms to prosecute and hold accountable corrupt government officials and greedy contractors and those who kill and torture civilians, he uses the justice system to arrest and keep in jail the more than 700 political prisoners. Instead of using public funds for social services, he buys helicopters, guns and bombs from the US and Israel, among others, to terrorize rural and indigenous communities and impose de facto martial law in the countryside. Instead of abolishing the highly questionable confidential and intelligence funds and defunding the NTF-ELCAC, he uses public funds to red-tag, surveil, and threaten those who exercise freedom of expression and association.
Despite all of Marcos Jr.’s efforts to shield himself, he can never prevent the snowballing anti-corruption campaign from landing at the doorsteps of Malacañang. The ever expanding wealth of information on bureaucratic corruption under the Marcos Jr. regime can lead the Filipino people to no other conclusion: that Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is today’s top bureaucrat capitalist the way his father was in his time, and that the Filipino people must forge the broadest possible unity and resoundingly expose and reject Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his ilk the way they condemned his dictator-father to the trash bin of history.
Even as we recall the dark years of martial law, we celebrate the enduring lessons of the Filipino people’s struggle and resistance during the Marcos dictatorship, as we march with thousands of our kababayan—that to protest and struggle against oppressive regimes is justified, that to exact justice and accountability is an exercise of the people’s sovereign right, and that thoroughgoing system change is necessary to genuinely address the social ills that we face.
Reference: KARAPATAN Public Information Desk, 0918-9790580
PUBLIC INFORMATION DESK
publi...@karapatan.org
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KARAPATAN is an alliance of human rights organizations and programs, human rights desks and committees of people’s organizations, and individual advocates committed to the defense and promotion of people’s rights and civil liberties. It monitors and documents cases of human rights violations, assists and defends victims and conducts education, training and campaign.