The Philippines Didn't Run Out of Activists to Kill. It Ran Out of Ways to Hide It.

On September 21, 2025, tens of thousands of Filipinos marched under the banner of "Baha sa Luneta" to demand accountability for a flood-control contracting scandal that had siphoned public money meant to keep people's homes from washing away. Police opened fire. A bystander construction worker, Eric Saber, was shot and later died of his wound. A fifteen-year-old, Mark Chustin Serbo, was stabbed to death by a shop owner near the protest. More than ninety people, many of them minors, were charged with sedition and conspiracy for showing up. This is the standard operating procedure of the Marcos administration when the street asks where the money went: criminalize the crowd, not the theft.

The protests didn't come from nowhere and they haven't stopped. They sit inside a longer pattern that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both been documenting for years under a name the Philippine state itself invented: red-tagging. Accuse an organizer, a land defender, a labor leader, or a trans rights activist of being a communist insurgent, and you don't need a warrant or a trial to put them at risk — you've just told every armed man with a grudge and a gun that the target is fair game. HRW's own 2026 country report lists the toll bluntly: journalist Ali Macalintal, a transgender rights radio commentator, shot dead by a hooded gunman in Mindanao in June 2025. Three more journalists killed across the year — Juan Dayang in April, Erwin Segovia in July, Noel Samar in October. None of these are isolated crimes. They are the predictable output of a system that has spent a decade teaching its security forces that dissent equals insurgency equals a legitimate kill.

What makes the flood-control scandal different is scale and visibility — it wasn't a remote logging or mining dispute in a province few outlets cover, it was Manila's own government caught fleecing money that should have been drainage infrastructure, in a country that floods every single year. The state's response was not to open the books. It was to let a SWAT unit fire into a crowd of people, mostly young, mostly furious about corruption killing their neighbors as surely as any bullet. The nine-year echo is impossible to miss: in March 2021, Philippine security forces killed nine land and labor activists in a single day of coordinated raids remembered as "Bloody Sunday." Families of those victims later told Karapatan that officials pressured them to drop their pursuit of accountability. The line from Bloody Sunday to Baha sa Luneta is not metaphorical. It's the same institutions, the same doctrine, the same impunity.

None of this is unique to the Philippines, and that's the point worth making from outside it. Red-tagging is a counterinsurgency tactic dressed up as a media strategy: it doesn't need to convict anyone of anything, it just needs to make an accusation loud enough and repeated enough that violence against the accused stops looking like a crime and starts looking like housekeeping. Every state that treats organizers as combatants — whether Manila calling unionists communists, Berlin calling migrants a security threat, or Washington calling protesters domestic terrorists — is running the same playbook with a local vocabulary. Solidarity here means naming it as one fight, not a series of unconnected regional tragedies to be pitied from a distance.

The Marcos government wants the flood-control scandal, the shootings, the stabbings, and the sedition charges filed against teenagers to read as separate news items with no throughline. They aren't. Every dead journalist, every red-tagged land defender, every kid facing a conspiracy charge for standing in a plaza is the same state protecting the same theft by making the people who noticed the theft afraid to say so out loud. The uprising didn't end when the cameras left Mendiola. Neither should the attention.

Sources

Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Philippines
Amnesty International, Human Rights in Philippines 2025
Wikipedia, 2025-2026 Philippine anti-corruption protests
Human Rights Watch, Philippines: Dangerous 'Red-Tagging' of Labor Leaders