*Dr. Rodolfo John Ortiz Teope, PhD, EdD
I still remember, back in high school at Aquinas School in San Juan City, coming across chilling stories in our library about Fr. Juan Severino Mallari—the first documented Filipino serial killer. A parish priest in Magalang, Pampanga during the Spanish colonial era, Mallari was discovered to have murdered dozens of parishioners. To me, even as a student, the horror of it was unforgettable: how someone trusted to protect and guide could instead prey upon his own flock. Society recognized then that such crimes were not mere lapses but repeated, deliberate killings. To call them anything less than serial murders would have been an insult to the victims. That same lens of truth is how I now view the Flood Control Syndicate. To call them merely “corrupt” is to insult the Filipino people. What they have committed is not simple graft—it is serial murder of lives, of opportunities, and of the nation’s future.
They are serial killers because whenever there are funds for flood control, they see it as their next victim. Every appropriation becomes a target, every project an opportunity to plunder. And for every ghost project signed off, for every dike built with substandard materials, there is death waiting downstream. It is serial, systematic, and deliberate. Their targets are not lone individuals, but the very lifelines meant to protect millions—and the result of each betrayal is always the same: deaths during floods, families broken, and futures destroyed.
This is not the work of a few greedy contractors. The Flood Control Syndicate is an organized network of Senators and Congressmen who push pork, COA officials who close their eyes, DPWH engineers who sign off on ghost projects, DBM officers who release funds, and contractors who execute the fraud. It is a machinery of betrayal that thrives on disaster, treating public safety budgets as prey to be devoured.
The consequences are measured not only in pesos but in lives. Each peso pocketed meant a child drowned, a parent swept away, or an elderly person trapped in rising waters. Survivors carried trauma so deep that some later died of sickness, stress, or despair. Properties vanished, savings were erased, and families were plunged into poverty. Students abandoned their studies because their parents could no longer recover. Some, cornered by hopelessness, turned to crime for survival. The Flood Control Syndicate did not only steal money—it manufactured death, trauma, and poverty.
And yet, I watched a Senate hearing where one Senator insisted that a billion-peso plunderer should be accepted into the Witness Protection Program, free of any retribution. To me, this is the ultimate insult. How can those who targeted every flood control project as prey, who amassed billions while communities drowned, be called “witnesses” instead of perpetrators? Granting them immunity is nothing less than betraying the Filipino people twice over.
If there are to be witnesses, let them be the mistresses, girlfriends, and boytoys who know the whole story during their intimate moments, the depositors, the dummies, the drivers, the bodyguards, and the employees who saw the truth unfold. They can expose the machinery without absolving the killers. But the masterminds themselves—the lawmakers, the auditors, the bureaucrats, and the contractors—must never be shielded.
I say this firmly: every peso must be recovered, every guilty company banned, every official tried. There is no “less guilty” among them. Each one carries blood on their hands, because every plundered peso had a death toll attached.
The flood control scandal is not only about stolen billions—it is about betrayal so deep that each flood is not just a natural disaster, but a crime scene. And the fingerprints are those of the Flood Control Syndicate.
When I think about it, I do not see numbers. I see the mother holding her drowned child. I see the father coughing in an evacuation center, broken. I see the student staring at her ruined notebook, her dream gone. I see the young man stealing bread, not out of greed, but because corruption left him no choice.
And if immunity is granted, it is as if we told them: “Your pain can be negotiated. Your tears can be traded.” That thought is unbearable.
Because when the rains come again, it will not only be water filling our streets. It will be tears—tears of mothers, tears of fathers, tears of students, tears of a nation betrayed.
And the cruelest part? Those tears may never dry—because the
serial killers of flood control will be living comfortably, untouched, under
the shield of immunity.
