Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the beneficiary of the second People Power, last Sunday played again the role of the ungrateful daughter of EDSA when she said that the world would condemn a third EDSA.
“The world embraced EDSA 1 in 1986. The world tolerated EDSA 2 in 2001. The world will not forgive an EDSA 3 but will instead condemn the Philippines as a country whose political system is unstable,” said Arroyo, who suddenly conveniently forgot that she wouldn’t have been president if not for the second version of the EDSA People Power Revolt in January 2001.
It was, of course, understandable because she would certainly be on the receiving end of the people’s ire if ever there would be an EDSA 3, which is never a remote possibility during her corrupt and abusive administration.
The past week reminded us of those dramatic days 23 years ago from Feb. 22 to Feb. 25, 1986 when a similarly corrupt and abusive government was about to collapse under the weight of a people finally grown tired of tyranny and oppression.
I was the senior assistant managing editor of the defunct Philippine Daily Express when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos gathered at the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) for four days from Feb. 22 to Feb. 25, 1986 in a spontaneous move to initially protect soldiers who had risen against then President Ferdinand Marcos, that just as spontaneously metamorphosed into a people’s uprising that toppled a dictator and awed the world.
For those four days, most of us in the Express newsroom stayed glued to our desks – not going home even for a few hours, with drivers picking up fresh clothes from our homes — watching developments and putting out extra editions after extra editions to chronicle what later became known as the People Power Revolution, and much later EDSA 1. And although we knew that the downfall of Marcos would ultimately lead to the closure of the Daily Express, having been infamously known as the Marcos mouthpiece, and the loss of our jobs, many of us were looking forward to a new dawn of freedom, not only for the Filipino people, but for the hundreds of Filipino journalists who had to work for 14 years under constant fear, threat and intimidation.
With the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, many newspapers flourished, and many of our colleagues, cognizant of the certain fate of the Express, left and joined them. I stayed and was managing editor of the 15-year daily when the government finally decided to close it down on Feb. 28, 1987, almost to the year after the People Power Revolt. I was back on the saddle, so to speak, the next day as the first managing editor of the then emerging Manila Standard.
It took just four days for the People Power Revolt to succeed in ousting a dictatorship, but it would be foolhardy to believe that EDSA was all it took to stage a revolution. The road to EDSA was long and tough, filled with blood and sacrifices of thousands of people, many of whom didn’t even make it to EDSA, much less enjoy the freedom it brought.
EDSA was the culmination of years of struggle by hundreds of men and women who endured imprisonment and torture, who gave up a promising future or even their lives, prominent among them the former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., whose death roused a long suffering people from dreadful apathy. EDSA was the fruit of the courage of people like Senators Jose Diokno, Lorenzo Tanada, Salvador Laurel, Jovito Salonga and Eva Estrada Kalaw, Cagayan Mayor Aquilino Pimentel Jr., Manila Times publisher Joaquino “Chino” Roces, human rights lawyers Joker Arroyo, Jojo Binay and Rene Saguisag, newspaper editors Jose Burgos Jr., Letty Magsanoc, and Eggie Apostol, among others (I must confess I envied their courage); and the thousands of militant activists and martyrs, such as Antonio Tagamolila, Billy Begg, Jack Pena and Edgar Jopson, who dared defy Marcos at the pinnacle of his power.
Despite continuous efforts by Arroyo and minions to downplay it and possibly bury it into oblivion, people power is far from dead and the spirit of EDSA will continue to live for as long as there are people who are willing to stand up against tyranny and oppression, and to fight injustice and corruption. Arroyo, who was the accidental beneficiary of the second EDSA People Power Revolt, wants us to forget EDSA because she fears being engulfed by its awesome power. She fears the very forces that catapulted her to power, a power she just as soon abused. She fears the very people that gave her their trust, albeit hesitantly, in EDSA 2 in January 2001. Her fear has grown so much, she can’t stand to see people gathering and she has now turned to the same oppressive tactics and policies that EDSA overcame in 1986 and 2001.
But just like they did at EDSA in those two historic years, things will come to a head again at EDSA. It took years of abuse and just a few days of rain before the mountains of Southern Leyte collapsed in 2006. The courage to fight eight years of abuse, corruption and insensitivity, and a few days at EDSA will all it take to bring down another tyrant.