Plunder in the Global South is often treated as a problem of corruption or weak governance, but its roots run far deeper. This explains the evolution of systems of exploitation, from colonial extraction to postcolonial elite capture, to postcolonial global financial dependency. This article explains how historical plunder was systematized and then globalized to show the reason why inequality continues to flourish and why reclaiming agency is about dealing with the structures of power of the past as well as the present.

Colonial Foundations of Plunder

Before the Philippines learned to call itself a nation, it first learned what it meant to be a resource.

Maybe it was never just stolen by thieves, but by systems – colonial, political, and economic, that have mastered the art of masquerading extraction as progress. Behind the facade of modernity and nation-building lies a continuity of exploitation. Initially by external powers, then by domestic elites who adopted the methods of exploitation. What was once extracted as gold and sugar is now siphoned off as labour and land, and the rhetoric of globalisation and development conceals the realities of the plunder.

By plunder, I do not just mean the loss of material wealth through theft. It is the loss of a people’s resources, memory, agency, and theft of the very ground beneath their feet. It is a theft that transforms the colonized or marginalized nation into a labouring and raw material-producing entity, while internally decimating their ability to determine their own futures.   

As Vicente Rafael has pointed out, colonial power in the Philippines was maintained not just through violence and trade, but also through “the colonization of consciousness” (Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 1988). It is the same “social life into profit” (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 1980) that Michael Taussig refers to as “plunder” and is very much alive in the world economy long after formal colonization has ended.

Colonial plunder in the Philippines did not end at the expense of tangible material wealth. Spain and the United States took more than goods. They implanted structures into this nation. They built bureaucracies designed for control, then continuously claimed it as representation; economies structured for export, instead of self-sufficiency; and social orders that rewarded intermediaries who served as brokers between empire and people. The result was a nation trained to serve external markets while depending on them for survival.

Some might argue colonial modernization built roads and schools that are still providing services, well, yes—but their purpose was always toward the ports, always export-oriented. Education was designed to produce clerks, shame the critics; commerce enriched a few mestizo families who became the postcolonial elite. When the Americans replaced the Spanish, they replaced friars with technocrats, sermons with civil service exams, and the Cross with the rhetoric of democracy but the logic of dependence remained.

This pattern was not unique to the Philippines. Across Southeast Asia, similar trajectories emerged: Dutch rule in Indonesia centralized control through the cultuurstelsel (culture system), turning peasants into producers for the global market; French Indochina saw Vietnam’s land reorganized for rice exports while local artisans declined; British Malaya’s tin and rubber industries thrived under a racialized labor hierarchy. In each case, “development” meant the building of infrastructures that connected the colony outward to ships, markets, and investors while disconnecting communities from local autonomy and self-sustaining growth.

Thus, the colonial legacy is not just about what was taken, but what was left behind: a blueprint for extraction disguised as governance. The bureaucracy, the roads, the schools, they remain as monuments of both progress and plunder, reminders that modernization, under empire, was never meant to be mutual.

Postcolonial Elites and the Institutionalization of Corruption

But if colonialism extracted under the guise of civilization, postcolonial plunder did so under the guise of nation-building. The end of foreign rule did not mean the end of extraction, it merely changed its agents. The local elite inherited not only power but also the colonial machinery of control, reshaping it to serve their own interests. The state became the new empire, and the governed, once again, the governed. 

Corruption in the Philippines is not an aberration of governance, it is governance itself, perfected through continuity.

Under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s two-decade dictatorship (1972–1986), plunder reached an industrial scale. The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) estimates that the Marcos family and their cronies stole between US$5 billion and US$10 billion, funneled through Swiss banks, shell corporations, and real estate acquisitions from Manhattan to Makati. This kleptocracy flourished through a web of monopolies: sugar, coconut, logging, run by loyal allies such as Roberto Benedicto and Danding Cojuangco. The martial law years centralized wealth and silenced dissent, transforming “development projects” into conduits of extraction. The so-called “edifice complex” those grand cultural and infrastructural projects stood as monuments to borrowed money and stolen futures.

Yet, the fall of Marcos did not dismantle the logic of plunder. It merely decentralized it. The 1987 Philippine Constitution’s democratic promise coexisted with the persistence of political dynasties, which today control about 80% of Congress and dominate every provincial government (Mendoza et al., Ateneo School of Government, 2013). These families: Aquino, Arroyo, Duterte, Marcos, inherited power not through vision but through lineage, maintaining political fiefdoms that convert public office into private enterprise. The colonial “intermediary class” found new form in these dynastic clans, bridging the global and the local, the elite and the electorate, in a performance of democracy that rarely delivers it.

Crony capitalism, too, survived every administration. From the Ramos-era privatizations to Estrada’s gambling scandals, from Arroyo’s ZTE broadband deal to Duterte’s favored contractors, the pattern remained: loyalty over merit, rent-seeking over reform. Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the Philippines at 114th out of 180 countries, evidence not of a few bad actors, but of a system designed for selective accountability.

Even today, plunder has only grown larger and more sophisticated. Based on estimates, it was revealed in Senate hearings, that as much as ₱1.089 trillion of the government’s climate-tagged spending since 2023 could, in the worst case, have been lost to corruption (about US $18.5 billion). In 2025 alone, that figure includes roughly ₱560 billion — around US $9.5 billion.

This scale of loss is more than a matter of misused funds. It reveals how contemporary plunder thrives in the very sectors designed to protect the vulnerable. Climate finance is meant to shield communities from the violence of environmental collapse. When these resources disappear into opaque transactions, the country’s most fragile regions become collateral in a political economy that treats catastrophe as an opportunity for gain. Extraction no longer occurs only in forests or farmlands. It expands into disaster response, budget negotiations, and public institutions that should have served as safeguards.

This is the postcolonial paradox. The colonizers have left, yet their ghosts persist, in bureaucracies that serve capital, in elites that reproduce inequality, and in a nation taught to equate construction with development, even when it leads to nothing but ruin.

Global Capital, Debt, and the Export of Vulnerability

If domestic elites perfected the colonial machinery, the global system ensured it kept running. The Philippines’ postcolonial condition is not one of isolation, but of entanglement; caught in trade, debt, and labor regimes that replicate dependency on a global scale. What once flowed to Madrid and Washington now flows to multinational lenders, investors, and corporations under the polished vocabulary of “development cooperation.”

Global trade and debt regimes sustain the illusion of partnership while reproducing hierarchy. Since the 1970s, the Philippines has borrowed heavily to finance development projects dictated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose conditionalities imposed austerity and privatization. By 2025, the country’s outstanding debt was recorded at ₱16.31 trillion or more than 888 billion USD. Each new loan justifies itself as investment, yet much of it cycles back out through interest payments, consultancy fees, and foreign contractors. The Philippines remains a debtor nation, its economy tethered to global markets it does not control.

Foreign investment, too, often mirrors old extractive relations. Mining concessions, many foreign-owned, continue to displace rural and Indigenous communities under the rhetoric of “sustainable development.” From the Tampakan copper-gold project in Mindanao to the ongoing reclamation of Manila Bay for luxury estates, the country’s natural wealth is still commodified for export, not empowerment. Infrastructure-for-debt deals, such as those under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, offer modernity at a price, just about billions of dollars and sovereignty mortgaged through long-term obligations and opaque contracts on the side.

Perhaps the most telling form of modern extraction is the export of people. The state’s labor export policy, institutionalized since the 1970s, has turned the Filipino workforce into a global commodity. Over 1.8 million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) were deployed in 2023, sending home over US$36 billion in remittances, sustaining an economy increasingly dependent on money earned abroad rather than jobs created at home. Labor migration is framed as heroism, but it is also a symptom, a coping mechanism for a system that cannot provide dignity domestically.

The country’s greatest export is not sugar or nickel, but its people. While foreign capital promises modernization, it also risks perpetuating the same asymmetry that has long defined the Philippines’ place in the world. A supplier of raw materials and cheap labor in a global system that rewards neither. Yet uncertainty persists, can globalization be reimagined, or is it too deeply structured by profit and power? The answer remains unsettled, suspended between dependence and resistance.

Memory, Neglect, and the Struggle to Reclaim Agency

Perhaps the gravest plunder is not of gold or oil, but of memory. The continuing normalization of loss, the quiet belief that nothing can ever change. If the body of the nation has long been mined and indebted, then its spirit has been slowly disarmed by forgetfulness. The colonial logic of control, once enforced through armies and decrees, now operates through fatigue and distraction.

Political scandals fade as swiftly as they erupt. Each revelation of graft or abuse feels like déjà vu. When corruption becomes expected, accountability becomes optional.

This dynamic extends to the world’s treatment of climate vulnerability. The Philippines receives attention when storms devastate entire provinces, yet the global response rarely addresses the long-term conditions that intensify these disasters. Humanitarian aid arrives only after destruction becomes impossible to ignore, and once the waters recede, the country returns to the margins of global concern. Such cycles create an international environment where sympathy becomes abundant but structural assistance remains scarce. Neglect evolves into a steady global habit that influences how developing nations are valued.

To remember, then, is to reclaim agency. It requires connecting present crises to historical trajectories that shaped the bureaucracy, the economy, and the unequal distribution of power.

A nation that understands its past can more clearly identify the motivations behind contemporary plunder and the alliances that sustain it. This clarity provides the ground on which reform can be built. It invites citizens to view corruption as a design rather than an accident and to recognize that dismantling that design demands more than changing leaders. The constant poverty, corruption, and exile of labor are neither natural nor permanent.

The Philippines stands at a point where acknowledging the continuity of plunder becomes essential for imagining a different future. Extraction persists because it has been allowed to define governance across generations. Challenging this reality involves strengthening institutions, expanding public participation, and ensuring transparency in areas where secrecy once disguised theft as development. It also involves engaging the global community on terms that emphasize sovereignty and long-term resilience instead of temporary relief.

A nation that reclaims its narrative gains the ability to confront both internal and external forces that profit from its vulnerability. This reclamation is neither simple nor swift, yet it begins with recognizing that plunder thrives where memory fades.

To hold the past with clarity is to open space for political possibilities that have long been denied.