MORE than 200 youth protesters were arrested and dozens of participants and police officers were injured as anti-corruption rallies in Manila turned violent Sunday, September 21, 2025.
Masked protesters hurled stones at anti-riot police and set fire to a container van on Ayala Boulevard.
The group, mostly teenagers, also waved the “One Piece” flag, a symbol of defiance carried by Gen Z protesters in Nepal and Indonesia, as they faced tear gas and water cannons.
By evening, protesters stormed a hotel on Recto Avenue in Manila, robbed it and torched several vehicles.
Renato Reyes Jr., president of the progressive group Bayan, who was leading a parallel protest, was hospitalized after his face was hit by a rock during the Mendiola rally.
"The people who stayed in Mendiola were angry, years of pent-up anger. We don’t know who the groups were. They’re not affiliated with Bayan. But we could sense their anger. And even after we ended the program, they stayed on," Reyes said.
Reyes and his group were among the estimated 100,000 people who joined the “Trillion Peso March” in Luneta and at the Edsa Monument in Manila.
"They could be provocateurs or they could just be really angry at what is happening. At the end of this day, the government cannot ignore the problem of corruption and give so-so responses. People's anger is boiling. The government should not underestimate it,” he added.
Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla told reporters in Manila on Monday, September 22, that police exercised maximum tolerance and were not armed with firearms.
"There was no discharge of weapon from any PNP [Philippine National Police] official," he said.
Of the 216 youth protesters arrested, at least 89 were minors.
Activist lawyer Aaron Pedrosa, secretary general of the multisectoral group Sanlakas, said they are monitoring who may need legal assistance.
“We can refer them to partners who may be able to assist,” Pedrosa told SunStar Philippines on Sunday.
“Many have been quick to denounce and distance themselves from the riots and skirmishes with the police. But just as horrendous as the condemnation of the outrage turned violence was the deafening silence and lack of solidarity, especially toward the mortally injured by gunshot wounds, those manhandled upon arrest, and those who remain detained — to the victims of state violence,” Pedrosa added in a separate statement.
Pedrosa warned the government not to forget the reason for the people’s outrage.
“Corruption is violence caused by the status quo. Remember: our indignation is legitimate. Our rage is justified. State violence is not,” he said.
Pastor Irma Balaba of the Promotion of Church People's Response said the clashes were “poverty itself speaking, demanding to be heard.”
“When the poor rise, they do not invent violence — they expose it. They unveil the deeper, systemic brutality we have too easily accepted: poverty wielded as a weapon by those in power,” she said.
“True peace cannot be born from silencing the anger of the poor, nor from crushing dissent beneath the weight of repression. Until then, the cries of Mendiola will echo — not as a threat, but as a reminder that peace without justice is merely another name for violence,” Balaba added.
During the September 21 rallies, protesters denounced corruption from the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte to that of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
Allegedly rigged infrastructure projects and “ghost” flood-control works worth billions of pesos were exposed in congressional hearings and acknowledged by Marcos.
Billed as the “biggest corruption scandal in history,” anomalies in public infrastructure projects reportedly drained the economy of P42.3 billion to P118.4 billion from 2023 to 2025, a Department of Finance study estimated. (Ronald Reyes/SunStar Philippines)
