EDSA never happened
March 9th, 2004
The primary lessons of People Power 1, the 18th anniversary of which falls this week, were twofold. The first is that the failure of Philippine political institutions can provoke citizen outrage enough for them to overthrow governments. The second is that vast sectors of the citizenry view human rights as a value worth defending, and even risking their lives for.
People Power 2, and the persistence of rumors of another EDSA, are reminders that, the years since People Power 1 notwithstanding, its first lesson is still as alive today as it was in 1986. On the other hand, the worsening assault on human rights—which today threatens to rival the worst periods of martial law—exposes the failure of all the four governments that came to power since 1986 to realize the People Power 1 mandate of reforming the police and the military.
Both mandates were clear enough. The Marcos regime was overthrown by a civilian-military mutiny during the four days of February 22 to 25, 1986. About two million Filipinos had massed at Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) between Camps Crame and Aguinaldo to prevent Marcos from arresting then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Armed Forces Deputy Chief of Staff Fidel V. Ramos, who had declared their withdrawal of support from Marcos.
The Marcos intelligence apparatus had discovered Ramos and Enrile’s plans for a coup, prompting the latter to retreat with their respective security entourages to Camps Crame and Aguinaldo. Responding to calls by the Catholic Church and other groups, a mostly middle-class throng had rushed to their defense by barricading the camps’ gates with their bodies. Inevitably, the removal of the Marcos regime itself became the point of the huge demonstration, and it soon attracted even more people.
While the immediate trigger of that uprising was the defense of Ramos and Enrile, it was the snap elections of February 7 which provided the key element to the expression of mass outrage that People Power 1 was. That outrage had been simmering for years, fed by the reports of the regime’s runaway corruption and human rights violations. It had reached near fever-pitch when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in 1983.
From 1983 onwards the Marcos regime had been mostly on the defensive as a result. Under pressure from the United States, which feared that a revolution was inevitable so long as Marcos had no credible mandate, in the last quarter of 1985 the regime had announced snap elections for 1986.
The elections were held February 7, as Marcos had promised, with himself and Ninoy Aquino’s widow Corazon contesting the presidency. The presence of a horde of foreign journalists and a US monitoring group did not stop Ferdinand Marcos from stealing them through, among others, the disenfranchisement of some three million voters, and a partisan Commission on Elections, whose spurious count of the votes cast for Marcos and for Corazon Aquino prompted a computer encoders’ walkout.
Few but the most naïve had expected Marcos to be fair. He had demonstrated during the Batasang Pambansa elections of 1978 and the equally phony presidential elections of 1981 that he would brook no erosion of his power. When the rubber stamp Batasang Pambansa declared him the winner on February 15, 1986, the unrest took on such proportions that it inevitably spilled into the defense and military establishments, where, in any case, a bruising rivalry between the Enrile and General Fabian Ver factions had been brewing since the early days of martial law.
But especially critical to People Power 1 was the perception, arrived at after 14 years of middle-class hopes that Marcos could still be removed through elections, that only direct citizen action could dismantle the dictatorship.
Traditionally conservative, the middle-classes had been initially supportive of martial rule. They hailed Marcos’ seeming effort to restore order in a society that seemed on the verge of chaos. They greeted with relief the confiscation of loose firearms, the elimination of warlord armies, and Marcos’ pledge of economic development.
They believed that Marcos had had no other recourse except martial law, which in any case was an option enshrined in the 1937 Constitution. They thought his rule legal, and Marcos took the greatest pains to make it seem so, to the extent of describing his government as “constitutional,” as in the phrase “constitutional authoritarianism.”
The 14-year period from 1972 to 1986 was to be the middle classes’ downward path to wisdom. The development for which they had agreed to trade the Bill of Rights never materialized. Instead they witnessed the country’s rapid slide to penury. Though only whispered about, the regime’s world class corruption—Marcos’ foreign bank accounts, Imelda Marcos’ jewels and oil paintings, the hijacking of foreign aid by Marcos and his team of cronies and relatives —soon became the worst kept state secret in the Philippines.
As far as his rule’s being legal was concerned, it soon became apparent that that claim was mostly based on the supine willingness of the courts, including the Supreme Court, to declare every issue as political and therefore Marcos’ domain. Marcos’ other “legal” means to validate his rule—among them the raising of hands at the barangay level to sanction everything from community beautification to the ratification of the 1973 Constitution—were eventually similarly exposed: as no more than attempts at preserving democratic form to conceal the regime’s authoritarian substance.
But what finally did the regime in was it is brutal record of human rights violations capped by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and, finally in 1986, its arrogant tampering with the snap election results.
Aquino’s assassination had occurred in the context of widening realization, despite the controlled media, that the regime was committing through the military some of the most hideous human rights violations on the planet. One of its signal contributions to the English language was its exquisite take on “salvaging,” which in the original meant to save, but in Philippine military use came to mean the exact opposite. When Ninoy Aquino was killed at the Manila International Airport on August 21, 1983, his death became the symbol of the violence the regime was inflicting on the entire Filipino people. In 1986, the fraud-ridden elections demonstrated the futility of seeking change through the ballot.
Philippine political and other institutions have been on trial since 1986, thanks to People Power 1. At issue is whether they can still function in furtherance of their stated purposes, among them their capacity to hear and obey the will of the people, as manifested in, among other means, the electoral process. Equally important, their capacity to protect the rights of citizens is also at issue.
These institutions—the presidency, the courts, congress, the police and the military—are failing the test. Among the indicators of this failure is the perversion of the electoral process through the politics of money, patronage, opportunism and deceit. As far as citizen rights are concerned, it is now “normal” for the police to use torture to exact confessions from crime suspects, and to detain children with adults. It is equally unremarkable for the courts to sentence children to death, together with Filipinos whose only crime is their poverty.
There is as well the almost routine harassment, “salvaging,” disappearances and arbitrary arrests and detention of social and political activists including those from party-list groups. And let us not forget the absolute impunity of the murderers of journalists (14 journalists have been killed in this country since Macapagal-Arroyo came to power). Not one has been prosecuted since 1986. The killing of journalists continues as a result.
The inevitable conclusion is that the Philippines is marking the anniversary of People Power 1 in a most crucial year, when what could be one of the dirtiest, most violent and in the end most meaningless electoral exercises in its history is being held, even as, in city and countryside, citizen rights are routinely violated, and those who protest murdered. It is as if People Power 1, just like People Power 2, was something everyone had only imagined. It never happened.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, February 24, 2004)