Duterte fans (Dutertistas) were at it again in Cebu City’s Fuente Osmeña rotunda Sunday, Sept. 21, 2025, when they tried to steal the Trillion People March (TPM) against corruption and for accountability in the Philippine government there.
The Dutertistas had been trying to preempt and hijack the TPM. They occupied Fuente before the march. They did not leave at the time allotted for the TPM to use the premises. Instead, they positioned themselves close to the stage prepared by the march’s leaders, vainly hoping to out-shout the participants.
While the march’s hosts led the rehearsals of chants to urge government officials past and present to account for the massive theft of infrastructure funds, the Dutertistas, complete with banners, disrupted the program and called for Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s ouster from the presidency.
Unfortunately for the Dutertistas, TPM participants were and are not joiners who would raise their fists in a Duterte salute just to please everyone in the bandwagon.
The Dutertistas did manage for a few moments to create the impression that TPM protesters were engaging them in a chanting match. But they were eventually sidelined.
Nevertheless, in typical fashion, after being told off by some TPM participants (lawyer, activist and former University of the Philippines faculty regent Lourdes Barcenas, for instance told them that Plaza Independencia, not Fuente, was their place), they sowed confusion, indiscriminately spreading instructions to march downtown to the plaza.
TPM conveners alerted their members to the feint. Dilaab executive director Teresa Tejero, for example, posted a message on the Church-based group’s social media page to remind its network to stay put.
Frustrated by their utter failure to commandeer the TPM, the Dutertistas then discarded all pretense of sympathy for the anti-corruption crusade. Ignorant or disconnected from the TPM’s purpose, they had foolishly assumed they could channel participants’ rage toward their goal of ousting Marcos Jr. and replacing him with impeached Vice President Sara Duterte.
Their assumption was wrong. And their power lust was unmasked, for they would not hold accountable Sara, who, according to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, received millions of pesos in campaign funds from contractors who regularly bid for government projects. Election law prohibits such activity.
So the Dutertistas went about doing their worst to sabotage the march, amplifying their speeches via loudspeakers just behind the TPM stage. I had to draw closer as lawyer and former martial law detainee Democrito Barcenas took the microphone to hear him amid the ruckus of the Dutertistas.
Had they had any inclination toward sobriety, the Dutertistas would have enriched themselves with precious lessons from the very mouth of a survivor of Marcosian martial law.
But they were consistent and once more chose the miserable path. When they should have been truthful, they used fake news to elect the Dutertes. When they should have defended human life, they cheered the drug war killings. When they should not have, they helped elect Marcos Jr. When they could have made up for their injustice against Leila de Lima at home, they instead trolled the International Criminal Court abroad.
Last Sunday, they could have made a real gesture of unity.
They chose, once again, to be divisive.
They were never for unity, only for partnership in crime.
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In the ecclesiastical province of Cebu, three bishops personally led their respective dioceses to the TPM.
Bishop Daniel Patrick Parcon of the Diocese of Talibon released a pastoral letter against corruption a full week before the march.
Bishop Alberto Uy of the Diocese of Tagbilaran exhorted the faithful to take to the streets. The prelate, who is Cebu archdiocese’s archbishop-designate, loudly denounced corruption via social media and in his homilies. He led the lighting of candles as part of the TPM in Tagbilaran.
Bishop Julito Cortes of the Diocese of Dumaguete led the TPM in his ecclesiastical circumscription. Cortes released not only a pastoral statement but also an oratio imperata, or mandatory prayer, against corruption.
I did not see any customized call from the Diocese of Maasin for the faithful there to join the TPM but diocesan social media featured the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ (CBCP) endorsement of the march. I have not chanced upon any statement from Bishop Precioso Cantillas.
The Cebu archdiocese exhorted its members via social media to join the TPM in Cebu City in the morning before the event. As of this writing, there is no available public statement from Archbishop Jose Palma, officially the apostolic administrator (no longer the sitting archbishop) of the archdiocese of Cebu, to localize the CBCP’s recent statements against corruption.
One may say that this enabled smaller communities in the archdiocese to respond to the corruption crisis with boldness and outside a clericalist approach. When our apostolic administrator — whom we profusely thank for his service — hands over the crozier to Uy at the end of September, the new archbishop will hopefully count healthy non-clericalism in Cebu as part of the gifts and responsibilities of his office.
The faithful of the archdiocese wish to stand for God and country. This was obvious last Sunday. Brothers, sisters, priests, seminarians and laity prayed the rosary in Fuente. But they did not join the chorus of those who called for death by hanging for the corrupt.
Those inclined to violence must know that well-formed Catholics stand under the Catechism according to which the death penalty is inadmissible. Activists can review their chants to cooperate in a pluralist society where although a minority they have some respect. The alternative is for them to be exposed as being as passionate about their fantasies of bloody revolution as Dutertistas are about their imaginings of a Duterte restoration.
