SOMETHING remarkable happened yesterday, something that should give Ombudsman Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla pause, assuming he is capable of pausing to reflect on anything other than his next political maneuver.
The day after Remulla announced he was filing a nonbailable plunder case against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta in the Sandiganbayan, at least 50,000 Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) members gathered at the EDSA People Power Monument in Quezon City without a permit, without advance notice and, most strikingly, without the usual three-day logistics buildup that normally precedes an INC mobilization of this scale.
The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority was caught flatfooted. “We didn’t expect it to be this huge,” its chairman said. Buses occupied portions of EDSA, blocking the busway. Several arrests were made after tensions flared with police. And INC spokesman Edwil Zabala delivered a statement that was brief, precise, and lethal in its implications, that what the administration plans to jail Marcoleta will be an injustice they will not stop protesting against.
This was not a scheduled mass action. This was a thunderclap, the INC’s way of telling Remulla, and the one pulling his strings — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — that they had crossed a line.
Significance
To understand the significance of this mobilization, one must understand the context of the INC’s prior mass actions, because this one is categorically different from all of them.
In November 2025, the INC staged its “Rally for Transparency and a Better Democracy” at the Quirino Grandstand, a three-day event that drew an estimated 650,000 at its peak. The cause: government corruption, the cover-up of the flood-control scandal, the obstruction of witnesses in the budget insertion controversy. The target was systemic: the broad failure of the government to be accountable to its citizens. Marcoleta spoke at that rally, but the rally was not about Marcoleta. It was about the Filipino people’s P100 billion.
In January 2025, the INC staged a “National Rally for Peace,” drawing an estimated 1.8 million participants across 13 locations simultaneously nationwide. The stated cause was again broad: peace, constitutional processes, the rejection of political destabilization.
Go back to August 2015, and you find the INC occupying EDSA for five days to protest then-justice secretary Leila de Lima’s interference in a criminal case involving INC ministers. Even then, the INC framed its protest in terms of institutional overreach against a community of believers — a religious liberty issue, not the defense of an individual senator.
In 2012, the INC put 600,000 people on the streets — the biggest mobilization since the 1986 People Power Revolution — in what was framed as a civic and religious gathering, even as it unmistakably dwarfed a simultaneous government rally in support of the impeachment of then-chief justice Renato Corona.
Framing
In every one of these instances, the INC’s official framing was either religious, civic, or broadly political. The defense of a specific elected official as the central, explicit purpose of a mass mobilization — called at 24 hours’ notice, the morning after a government announcement — is without clear precedent in the INC’s modern history of street action. And the INC did not try to camouflage it. Zabala confirmed flatly: the rally was to support Senator Marcoleta.
The question every Filipino should ask is this: What does it take to make the INC abandon its traditional caution about explicitly political mobilizations in defense of one man?
The answer is: It takes a man who has spent years fighting for the Filipino people’s money — and a government that just moved to silence him.
Let us be precise about what Remulla is actually doing, because the INC statement is not wrong.
On March 17, 2026, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc voted 6-0 to terminate its investigation of Senator Marcoleta over the P75 million in undisclosed campaign donations. The Comelec’s Political Finance and Affairs Department found that while Marcoleta indeed failed to declare the contributions from three donors in his statement of contributions and expenditures, but the nondisclosure of campaign contributions is no longer a criminal offense under Philippine law. Section 39 of Republic Act 7166 repealed Section 109 of the Omnibus Election Code — the very provision under which a disclosure violation would have been punishable. Comelec Chairman George Garcia was unambiguous: “It is already decriminalized.”
Different
Ombudsman Remulla is now pursuing Marcoleta on an entirely different, preposterous theory: that because Marcoleta was a sitting senator at the time he received the donations, they constituted bribes in exchange for official acts — a theory that transforms a campaign finance compliance issue into a plunder charge, bypassing the Comelec’s findings by invoking antigraft jurisdiction instead.
Remulla, who is more of a politician than a lawyer, has been clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel of legal tricks to throw at Marcoleta, who has been intent in unearthing those responsible for the flood-control scam and especially in sending its mastermind to jail. If Remulla’s absurd claim is correct, most of the sitting senators and representative who ran in the May 2025 midterm elections and received campaign donations for those polls are guilty of graft or plunder. Worse, since it is Remulla who has the discretion to investigate if this legislator or that received campaign donations, he would put many of the senators and House members under his Damocles sword.
Let us call this what it is: the weaponization of the enormous powers of the Ombudsman.
Remulla is not a neutral officer of the law enforcing the country’s antigraft laws. He is a deeply political figure — former justice secretary under President Marcos, now Ombudsman — who has put himself and his younger brother, Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla, as vassals of the Marcos family. His appointment to the Ombudsman’s office, an institution constitutionally designed to be independent of the executive, was itself a statement: this government intends to control the institution whose primary function is to prosecute government officials. Even the justice secretary who replaced him, Frederik Vida, is his factotum, an obscure vice mayor and then mayor for nine years of Mendez town in Cavite, which the Remulla clan controls.
At the November 2025 INC rally, Marcoleta specifically named Remulla as the official who had tried to block Curlee and Sarah Discaya — who first blew the whistle on the flood-control scam — from joining the government’s Witness Protection Program, demanding they “return the money” before their application would even be processed — a requirement with no basis in law. Marcoleta also cited Remulla’s office for imposing impossible conditions on witnesses who pointed to former speaker Martin Romualdez as the mastermind of the budget insertion scandal. In other words: the man Remulla is now charging with plunder is the same man who, six months ago, was publicly accusing Remulla of obstructing justice.
Credulity
To believe that these two facts are unrelated requires a level of credulity that the INC — with its 50,000 members on the streets — clearly does not possess.
The plunder charge against Marcoleta is not the justice system working as designed. It is the justice system being used as a weapon against the senator most visibly threatening the interests of the ruling political network. Plunder is a nonbailable offense. Once filed with the Sandiganbayan, Marcoleta faces detention — for years, as most Ombudsman cases last — before a verdict is reached. He cannot campaign. He cannot investigate. He cannot speak from the Senate floor. He is, for all practical purposes, neutralized.
That is not upholding the law. That is political assassination.
The INC’s statement carries a line that Ombudsman Remulla would do well to read slowly: “Even if they imprison Senator Marcoleta, we will not stop demanding justice for our fellow Filipinos who were robbed.”
That is not a threat. It is a promise from an organization that has demonstrated, repeatedly and across decades, that when it makes a promis about what its members will do on the streets, it keeps it.
When 5 million people attended the INC’s centennial celebration in 2014 — the largest gathering in Philippine history at that time — it was a demonstration of organized mass faith that no government could ignore. What that faith is now being directed toward is the proposition that Remulla’s Ombudsman has become an instrument of political persecution rather than prosecution.
Remulla should worry less about filing the case, and more about what the Filipino people intend to do about it.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
