On the 128th anniversary of the Declaration of Philippine Independence yesterday, the barbed wires were back.

Container vans and coils of razor wire were once again positioned around the Presidential Palace. The thorns of steel are the government’s most honest admission of where things stand today between the people and their leaders.

Forty years ago, Filipinos clipped pieces of the barbed wire in Mendiola and took them home as souvenirs of the day they fought and won their democracy back. They had forced a dictator to flee.

The wire came down, allowing the country to exhale. It was thought the street-level symbol of oppression was gone for good; now it is back with a vengeance.

Since 15 March, the streets leading to Malacañang — Nicanor Padilla, Mendiola, and Arlegui — were once again barricaded with razor wire as police went on high alert.

By May Day, over 1,600 officers were deployed to the historic streets. The area was sealed off, aside from barbed wire, with container vans, and protesters were herded to the front of San Sebastian College on Recto, while Mendiola was declared off limits following the riot that occurred on 21 September last year.

The massive public works corruption that provoked all this was of a scale that tested comprehension. Some P1.9 trillion had been allocated to flood control over the years, more than half of which was lost to ghost and substandard infrastructure, to kickbacks delivered in cash-stuffed suitcases to some of the highest ranking government officials.

The Mindanao earthquake 10 days ago provided the exclamation point to what happens when public money is redirected to private pockets.

Nature merely revealed what corruption had built: weak structures not meant to last, that posed hazards rather than brought safety.

Eighteen men who identified themselves as former Marines testified that they delivered suitcases filled with cash to top government officials who included President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his cousin, then House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

The Senate’s response was to conduct less of an investigation than to fight over which faction would get to conduct it.

Accountability is a farce when those being investigated control the investigative machinery. The Senate was reorganized precisely when the hearings began to draw blood. The Blue Ribbon Committee’s chairmanship changed hands three times.

The witnesses were alternately invited, disinvited, re-invited, and ultimately snubbed.

When public funds are plundered, the plunderers reach for institutional life rafts the way a drowning man reaches for anything that floats.

An administration that deploys barbed wire against its citizens is saying plainly what it refuses to say out loud: we are afraid of you, and we should be.

Mendiola has borne witness to generations of Filipino anger and defiance, from the First Quarter Storm to the present. Corruption changes labels and mechanisms, but the rage does not.

Some 128 years after Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence in Kawit, the call for freedom has narrowed to the right to expose abuses, hold officials to account, and demand that the trail of diverted flood control funds be followed to its conclusion.

These are not seditious demands. They are what Filipinos require, but the barbed wire tells them plainly what those in power think of them.