MILLION PEOPLE MARCH

The so-called Million People March was the first of a series of protests in the Philippines calling for the total abolition of the Pork Barrel fund, triggered by public anger over the Priority Development Assistance Fund scam. Initial calls circulated through social media (mainly on Facebook and Twitter) to convene a protest on August 26, 2013 at Luneta Park in Manila as well as other cities nationwide and overseas. Some media commentators consider this as the first ever massive rally in the Philippines called and organised mostly through social media channels.

The so-called "Pork Barrel Scam" was first exposed in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on July 12, 2013, with the six-part exposé of the Inquirer on the scam pointing to businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles as the scam's mastermind after Benhur K. Luy, her second cousin and former personal assistant, was rescued by agents of the National Bureau of Investigation on March 22, 2013, four months after he was detained by Napoles at her unit at the Pacific Plaza Towers in Fort Bonifacio. Initially centering on Napoles' involvement in the 2004 Fertilizer Fund scam. After Napoles turned to Malacanang for help regarding the supposed harassment by members of the NBI in April 2013, the whistleblowers and their lawyer presented affidavits stating that Napoles' company “had defrauded the government of billions of pesos in ghost projects involving the creation of at least 20 bogus nongovernment organizations.

The government investigation on Luy's testimony has since expanded to cover Napoles' involvement in a wider scam involving the misuse of PDAF funds from 2003 to 2013. 8 of the 82 questionable NGOs are linked to Napoles with the filing of complaints for 74 others currently pending. "As more and more records—even from recent years—are examined, it appears that the misuse of pork did not stop in 2009. And while the congressional pork barrel already puts at least 25 billion a year in the hands of lawmakers, the fact is there are hundreds of billions worth of special and regular funds disbursed and possibly misused year after year".