by BIMBO CABIDOG
At around eight in the evening of February 25, 1986 long reigning dictator Ferdinand Marcos fled the country. He ruled for 20 years.
Marcos's flight ended a dispensation marked by the death of democracy, the curtailment of liberties and basic rights of the people, and rapacious plunder. For fourteen years, the country reeled under a regime of whimsical decrees by one man, serving only the narrow interests of his family, his underlings in the military top brass, fattened bureaucrats, and business cronies.
On record, more than 70,000 activists and oppositors were incarcerated with no warrant of arrest, nor due process in a fair court of justice. Security forces tortured, vanished without trace, or murdered dissenters and mere suspects docketed as subversives. State operators clamped down media, leaving only the government's mouthpieces to air and print. Legitimate businesses were squeezed to bankruptcy or seized.
In the last three years of the dictatorship, political and economic turbulence buffeted the country. This followed as a result the treacherous murder of the former senator and returning opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. at the Manila International Airport tarmac. The people saw foul play at his death in the hands of Marcos's military thugs. From then on, rallies, marches and instant noise barrage erupted almost by the day. The financial system crashed. The economy took a nose-dive. Firms closed shop. Banks went on holiday. The Gross Domestic Product plunged to year-on-year negative growth. Heavily indebted and cash-strapped, the government tottered on the brink of collapsing.
Lenin, socio-political theorist who sired the October 1917 Revolution of Russia, wrote that a profound revolutionary crisis exists when the rulers can no longer rule in the old way, and the people likewise can not be ruled anymore in the same old way. During the tumultuous period of the citizenry's awakening and spirited political action from 1983-1986, the battle cry in the streets was: "Sobra na, tama na!" The oppressed have had enough of official thievery and repression that was making their lives hell. It was impossible anymore to live under the old order.
The end would finally be brought by a mismanaged situation that snowballed into the biggest crisis of Marcos's rule. A group of junior military officers, naming themselves Reform the Armed Forces Movement, plotted a putsch. The loyal minions of Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver uncovered the conspiracy and nipped it at the incipient stage. The fleeing mutineers were driven to hole up at the Defense headquarters in Camp Aguinaldo for survival. That was where the big trouble that culminated in Marcos’s downfall sprang.
Marcos's flight ended a dispensation marked by the death of democracy, the curtailment of liberties and basic rights of the people, and rapacious plunder. For fourteen years, the country reeled under a regime of whimsical decrees by one man, serving only the narrow interests of his family, his underlings in the military top brass, fattened bureaucrats, and business cronies.
On record, more than 70,000 activists and oppositors were incarcerated with no warrant of arrest, nor due process in a fair court of justice. Security forces tortured, vanished without trace, or murdered dissenters and mere suspects docketed as subversives. State operators clamped down media, leaving only the government's mouthpieces to air and print. Legitimate businesses were squeezed to bankruptcy or seized.
In the last three years of the dictatorship, political and economic turbulence buffeted the country. This followed as a result the treacherous murder of the former senator and returning opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. at the Manila International Airport tarmac. The people saw foul play at his death in the hands of Marcos's military thugs. From then on, rallies, marches and instant noise barrage erupted almost by the day. The financial system crashed. The economy took a nose-dive. Firms closed shop. Banks went on holiday. The Gross Domestic Product plunged to year-on-year negative growth. Heavily indebted and cash-strapped, the government tottered on the brink of collapsing.
Lenin, socio-political theorist who sired the October 1917 Revolution of Russia, wrote that a profound revolutionary crisis exists when the rulers can no longer rule in the old way, and the people likewise can not be ruled anymore in the same old way. During the tumultuous period of the citizenry's awakening and spirited political action from 1983-1986, the battle cry in the streets was: "Sobra na, tama na!" The oppressed have had enough of official thievery and repression that was making their lives hell. It was impossible anymore to live under the old order.
The end would finally be brought by a mismanaged situation that snowballed into the biggest crisis of Marcos's rule. A group of junior military officers, naming themselves Reform the Armed Forces Movement, plotted a putsch. The loyal minions of Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver uncovered the conspiracy and nipped it at the incipient stage. The fleeing mutineers were driven to hole up at the Defense headquarters in Camp Aguinaldo for survival. That was where the big trouble that culminated in Marcos’s downfall sprang.
On the afternoon of February 21, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile joined the rebellious bunch. I was taking a leisurely stroll along a street in San Juan City that afternoon, full of thoughts. No day passed that we didn’t feel already the insurrectionary atmosphere emanating from the relentless rallies and marches around Metro Manila and nearby localities. They have intensified in frequency and force after the wholesale cheating by Marcos of presidential candidate Cory Aquino, in the just concluded snap election. Walking near a store, I heard the big news from a radio inside: Marcos’s top henchman, Enrile, has defected. It jolted me from reverie, daydreaming of how the vanguard progressive bacilli of the current movement could escalate further the mass protests.
Enrile himself made the stunning announcement. Until evening, the story went on and on, on the AM band. At first, I could not wrap my mind around the fact that the Defense Minister, an unquestionably big figure second only in authority to Marcos, has cast his lot with the young officers and turned against him. The news later was that they have already barricaded themselves at Camp Aguinaldo in open defiance. At that critical moment, the nation was luckily tuned in to the frequency broadcasting the story.
I was instinctively suspicious, as my comrades in the radical left were. What were they up to? Whereto was their military adventurism heading? At the very least, we had to hold it with some caveat. Only the rallies of the basic masses and politicized middle forces, facing the truncheons and water cannons and even tear gas and live bullets of Marcos’s centurions could be relied upon.
But somehow, the Enrile-RAM break seemed legit enough to ponder favorable scenarios. The crisis of rule was building. The officers’ rebellion may already be part as well as outcome of it. The fact that Mr. Martial Law Administrator himself was on board put Marcos in real bad shape. The situation would further exacerbate when Constabulary Chief General Fidel Ramos crossed to the side of the mutineers.
The month of February brought the most ominous signs of the times. Outcomes by the day were becoming unpredictable and fast, such as the perfect storm brewing at Edsa. Initially the people came to Edsa to rally behind the call of Manila Archbishop Cardinal Sin for support with prayers and warm bodies to the beleaguered military rebels. The first gathering was to put up a moral buffer to shield them from the wrath of Marcos by dissuading potential attackers from proceeding with a bloody assault.
But the objective quickly shifted. When support waxed into a groundswell, the gathering rapidly evolved into full-blown uprising. It had its sights now on Marcos’s ouster.
The peaceful presence of millions of citizenry obviated resort to arms. It helped that the massive civilian outpouring occurred in the nuclei of the state’s armed apparatuses. Wedged between the country’s two most strategic camps, it held to a standstill Marcos’s invincible military machine. The locus brought the popular insurrection in full view of the world. A global consensus soon formed in favor of it. Meanwhile, because of the accessibility, aid or augmentation with more warm bodies easily reached it in minutes.
On the third day, our group of leftist militants, sans the usual red banners and streamers, joined the throngs. We noticed a column of armored personnel carriers, cannon-mounted tanks with machine guns jutting from turrets, and soldiers fully geared for battle moved in on a road perpendicular to the bulk of demonstrations. But the assault regiment was stopped on its tracks with flowers and prayers by the ranks of the religious – nuns, priests, seminarians and lay brothers. The peaceful and prayerful Edsa warriors hedged their bodies in front of the machines. The more intrepid clambered up the decks.
Layer after layer, on the long stretch of Edsa from Cubao to Ortegas, the rising citizenry formed a massive wall of warm human bodies now called people power. It deterred any planned military advance and deflected the outbreak of a shooting war with nothing but a moral force.
The fifth day of the standoff was hot, but spine tingling. Early in the afternoon, our ranks from the left broke off with the multitude at Edsa and transferred to Mendiola. Around Quezon City, especially along Aurora Boulevard up to Sta. Mesa, Manila, and the stretch of E. Rodriguez up to Espana, communities have gone out to barricade streets and major thoroughfares against further plying of vehicles especially by the loyalist soldiers of Marcos. It was also to prepare for the Welgang Bayan (People’s Strike) the next day.
By dark, when we reached the corner of Mendiola and Legarda, our contingent has already waxed into a huge throng. Thousands of people trudged behind us. squeezing into Recto Avenue, from the bridge up to Quezon Boulevard. Thousands more occupied the adjoining street of Legarda. We started cutting the rolls of concertina wires making up the Malacanang security barrier at the bridge.
Bystanders have climbed and perched on ledges and awnings of buildings. They shouted “Pasok! Pasok!” (Enter, Enter). But we have already slipped our banners and streamers inside the protective perimeter zone of the palace, even before the clearing of the wires.
Except for the buzzing of the crowds around the area, the night fell into quiet like the few seconds of suspended breath before a hanging. Beams of light from the full moon lent a romantic sheen to the leaves of the trees along the sides of the San Beda and Centro Escolar colleges. Suddenly, the big choppers chugged. They quickly loomed in the moonlit sky then vanished.
As soon as we made the wide breach on the rolled barricades, the heaving crowds behind us broke loose. Like the floodwaters of a spilling dam, they roared down to the gates and tall fences of Malacanang.
Minutes after the appearance of the choppers, we got the official news from the transistor radio comrades always brought along in that time of marches. The ailing Ferdinand Marcos, members of his family, and close aides have left. They flew out of the country on board the two Sikorsky helicopters we saw earlier courtesy of the United States government.
The strongman, impaled by lupus, landed in Hawaii where he would spend the last days of his life in malignant illness and self-exile. The formidable ruler, whose son once boasted of owning the Philippines, got a small piece of real estate to seek refuge from his angry countrymen in the territory of his once abiding but later abandoning imperialist ally.
I have used the first person point of view in portions of this story to stress that I am relating them from living memory. My sharing, the telling of other witnesses, and the account of professional chroniclers could already piece from different angles and perspectives the full narrative of that complex political experience that our people underwent, more than three decades ago. So, what did those great developments say to us today?
In moments of overwhelming trouble and suffering, the people would always look for a hero to swoop in and save them. The dependence on messiahs or personas of great prowess - often more imagined than real, only prolongs the problem without solution. The saga of Edsa showed that the hero everyone may have been waiting for was no one else but the people themselves. Yes, the masses showed up to be the real heroes, making history by their collective action. One such historical episode was the people power upheaval at Edsa.
The spirited pace of events during the five Edsa days that shook the world portrayed one thing: the masses were doing them. No group, organization, coalition or powerful personality, whatever their claims of might and all-encompassing thought, could have done such epic. It was a history solely made by the people: from subservience to liberation, from 14 years of enduring tyranny to the brief moment of vanquishing it.
The old order rapidly crumbled with the refusal of the people to be passive any longer, and be condemned to chaff under the iron fist of Marcos. Instead, they seized their fate. The massive political upheaval was clearly about them already taking into their hands the determination of how things must be. Such was the much talked-about spirit of Edsa.
Thirty one years since, we still see a lot of unmet expectations. The same ills have slipped back. Chronic blaming and partisan finger-pointing, instead of concrete solutions, prevail. Have people given up on deep economic, political and social change? Where is the spirit of Edsa now?
After the euphoria and nursing of great expectations, the Edsa victory soon lapsed into living again under the same conditions and situations of existence as before for the vast majority . In a short time, the nation's collective hope would start to fade on the promise of transformation borne by the hours and days of sleepless vigils, tireless marches, resonant chants, dogged unrest, contagious solidarity, courage, and heroism of ordinary folks that the world praised and other peoples, confronting similar tyranny, later emulated.
There have been great visions, visions that were dashed. Edsa today may even be worse, a boulevard of broken dreams, of MRT woes, choking traffic that waste billions of pesos in fuel and man hours, tong collection by traffic police and MMDA enforcers, issues to provide cannon fodder for opportunistic politicians’ propaganda war, and many things that we hate about ourselves.
Monday morning quarterbacks continually blame leaders and government for our pains, even as scholars long debate the difference between people power and people’s power and what they are to the aspiration of fundamental change. But do they matter?
We avoid talking about the surrender of the people’s option at change once more to the returning elite, traditional politicians, and their petty running dogs, right after the epic. The masses relinquished the power in their hands, not knowing what it was and what to do with it. They gave it back to the re-established cliques of the ongoing ruling classes in the merry-go-round of power.
And the new ones lost no time in seizing economic spoils, dividing bureaucratic largess, pocketing sequestered wealth, and consolidating stranglehold always to the exclusion of the great masses, no matter what Constitution they have.
Was there anything to hope in the first place? All the boasts of politicians, economists, bureaucrats, prophets of big business, academics and self-claimed experts about having the magic solution turn out to be empty. It is so, because they are not supposed to solve the problem rooted in the social structure.
So again, what did Edsa taught? A confluence of factors and breaking events – many of them by miraculous coincidence, brought to a close the fourteen dark years of Marcos's rule. But they could not have progressed towards it without the meeting of the minds and fusion of spirit by millions of people wanting to have no more of the dictator. Consciousness came first before the action.
The latter is important to take note. Edsa was a long hard fight from the start that went back even long before the watershed assassination of Ninoy Aquino. But the fight was not about scoring a decisive or strategic or complete victory by whatever force and stratagem. Not yet! It was about winning the hearts and minds of the masses, raising their consciousness, arousing them to take action, and educating them to take the proper action. Alas, this phase has been limited. It fueled a mass momentum that did not went beyond Edsa.
The fight has been there all along egging to be fought, way before the pale of two million people struck by sudden heroism. You can wage a protracted or short struggle, kill as many agaw-armas victims as you can, collect as many blood debts as you can, increase the tactical offensives, build strategic bases in forest hinterlands, shout the loudest in rallies, burn the biggest effigies caricaturing the ugliest face of the enemy, bar traffic for thousands of cursing commuters, be very good at opposing. But if you don't fight for the heart and mind of the people, and fight effectively well, you can waste two more generations in a war that is unwinnable.
My comrades in the left always taught it, but never really learned it. Arouse. Mobilize. Organize. Before talking of reaching parity in arms, and encircling the cities from the countryside, arouse and mobilize the masses in their millions. Before talking of building red bases and hoisting organs of power, that in a bout of self-delusion is proudly touted to already see the outskirt of territorial government happening soon and very quick, arouse and mobilize the barrio folks, the dwellers in the sitios, and the poor cramping like sardines in blighted slums.
Once upon a time, the spirit of a united and active citizenry shone in five days that shook the world. Ordinary folks showed heroism in full display. Now the spirit is just a ghost, more belittled by the rulers than feared. Will its might of epic proportion shine again?
