It takes an extraordinary kind of audacity to suggest that the very people accused of bleeding this country dry—of siphoning billions of pesos from ghost flood control projects, substandard bridges, and shoddily built government buildings—deserve not only to keep their loot, but to have the public pay for their protection. Yet here we are, with Senator Rodante Marcoleta apparently ready to twist the law into a personal umbrella for the Discaya couple, while the rest of the nation drowns in the wreckage they allegedly left behind.
Let’s be clear: if Marcoleta’s line of thinking prevails, the message is chillingly simple—steal big enough, and the State will guard your mansion. It will shield you with taxpayer-funded security, while the families of those who died in flash floods caused by your ghost projects are left to pick through the mud, mourning loved ones and livelihoods. Every bridge that collapsed, every barangay washed away, every small business ruined by floods that shouldn’t have happened—Marcoleta would have us forget them all, so long as the Discayas whisper a few convenient names into the microphone.
The sheer indecency of it is staggering. Senator Tito Sotto is right: the Discayas are reportedly so wealthy they could buy a Rolls Royce and still have enough left to hire a thousand armed guards. They don’t need witness protection. What they need is accountability. They need to return what they allegedly stole—not hide behind a legal loophole that Marcoleta now clings to like a drowning man clutches driftwood.
Marcoleta’s insistence that Republic Act 6981 does not require restitution is technically clever and morally bankrupt. Law is not a hollow ritual. It was never meant to be weaponized to grant comfort and impunity to the very architects of public misery. The law’s spirit is to protect those who risk themselves to tell the truth—not those who only talk when cornered, and even then, tell only half of it. The Discayas’ testimony, as even Senators Pangilinan and Sotto pointed out, is riddled with selective amnesia. They name names only from 2022 onward, conveniently skipping the years when their alleged empire of corruption was in full bloom. Tell-all, not tell-half, Sotto said—and he’s right.
What Marcoleta is proposing is not justice. It is state-sponsored laundering of guilt. It is the ritual humiliation of every Filipino taxpayer: we will bankroll the security of billionaires who allegedly stole our future, while we bury our dead from floods that should never have killed them. We will pay to keep them safe, while our children paddle to school through knee-deep floodwater.
This is not governance. This is a grotesque inversion of justice. If Marcoleta truly believes the Discayas’ lives are in danger, then let them use their alleged billions to buy protection—as Sotto quipped, they can afford a Rolls Royce with an umbrella. The Filipino people are not obligated to carry that umbrella for them, least of all while standing waist-deep in the floodwaters those billions were supposed to prevent.
Enough of this charade. Justice is not a luxury item to be purchased by the kilo. It is a duty—and it begins by refusing to protect plunderers at the people’s expense.
