Protesters have thrown rocks at police during a rally against government corruption in Manila.
Tens of thousands of people marched in protest of an alleged ring of politicians, officials and business people accused of pocketing huge kickbacks from flood-control projects in the poverty-stricken Southeast-Asian country.
The city estimates that over 50,000 people took part in the demonstration, dubbed the “trillion-peso march”, after the estimated 1.9tn Philippine peso (£25bn) spent on flood defence in the country, more than half of which was allegedly lost to corruption.
Police made 17 arrests after masked protesters threw rocks and set fire to the tyres of a barricade truck near the presidential palace.
Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, called on the public to demonstrate peacefully and demand accountability.
In a statement, he said: “Our purpose is not to destabilise but to strengthen our democracy.”
“I feel bad that we wallow in poverty and we lose our homes, our lives and our future while they rake in a big fortune from our taxes that pay for their luxury cars, foreign trips and bigger corporate transactions,” student activist Althea Trinidad told The Associated Press in Manila, where she joined a noisy crowd that police estimated to number around 8,000 people by midday.
“We want to shift to a system where people will no longer be abused.”
Trinidad lives in Bulacan, a flood-prone province north of Manila, where officials said the most flood-control projects were being investigated either as substandard or non-existent.
Organisers said protesters would focus on denouncing corrupt public works officials, legislators and owners of construction companies, along with a system that allows large-scale corruption, but they would not call President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to step down.
“It’s very rare for me to go to rallies, but this situation was bad enough that I was really urged to say ‘this is enough’,” Mitzi Bajet, a 30-year-old designer, told AFP at the rally.
Marcos first highlighted the flood-control corruption scandal in July in his annual state of the nation speech.
On Monday, Marcos said he did not blame people for protesting “one bit” while calling for demonstrations to remain peaceful. The army has been placed on “red alert” as a precaution.
Public outrage erupted when a wealthy couple who ran several construction companies that won lucrative flood-control project contracts showed dozens of European and American luxury cars and SUVs they owned during media interviews.
The fleet included a British luxury car costing 42 million pesos ($737,000) that they said they had bought because it came with a free umbrella.
