On that jubilant night of February 25, 1986, I danced in the streets even if I was on crutches from a minor surgery on my left foot.
The streets were packed like one blaring party. Everyone else was dancing in wild abandon. The sentiment of that evening was too good to be true: the Marcos dictatorship family had fled the Philippines, something that was not to be imagined under their dreaded 20-year rule. Except that my EDSA was not in Metro Manila. It was in my home city of Cagayan de Oro.
This was the city in Mindanao that was tested by fire during the Marcos dictatorship. Even prior to 1986, there were street protests there already. In 1981, the dictator Marcos had its city mayor Nene Pimentel ousted from office. His sin, according to the Comelec, was “political turncoatism” for switching from Ninoy Aquino’s Laban party in 1978 to the Mindanao Alliance in the 1980 elections. It was not just Nene that became formidable to the dictator — the Mindanao Alliance had outvoted all of the dictator’s Kilusang Bagong Lipunan candidates in Cagayan de Oro and Misamis Oriental.
And so in a force of 10,000, the people of Cagayan de Oro went out on the streets as a show of defiance. I witnessed that street march. It was massive but eerily quiet. There were no agit-props, no loudspeakers. The only thing one could hear was the shuffling of thousands of feet on the hot asphalt pavement of Plaza Divisoria, the city’s turn-of-the-century central thoroughfare.
In 1983, Marcos had Nene jailed again, his third time, for “donating” P100 to the New People’s Army. The Archbishop of Cagayan de Oro Patrick Cronin, an Irish naturalized Filipino, wrote a rare pastoral letter asking the people to extend its best moral support to its jailed mayor. I can still remember my mother responding with a telegram addressed to Nene, care of his military camp — “Praying for your release.” Unknown to us then, these spontaneous protest narratives had served as dress rehearsals for something bigger to come.
When EDSA erupted in those four tumultuous days of February 1986 in Manila, everything was a walk in the park for Cagayan de Oro. It expressed solidarity through four days of noise barrage all over the city. Over at Xavier University Ateneo de Cagayan, there were daily showings of a documentary on the Marcos family’s ill-gotten wealth.
This was where I learned about the Marcos family’s four Manhattan skyscrapers: the Crown Building at 730 5th Avenue, the Herald Center on 1293 Broadway Avenue, the 40 Wall Street Building (which later ended in the hands of Donald Trump), and the 200 Madison Avenue office building. There were also five Manhattan condominium units, a townhouse on East 66th Street, and the 15-bedroom Lindenmere manse on an 8.2-acre estate in Center Moriches, Long Island, among countless others.
At that time, there was as yet no Presidential Commission on Good Government but credible information was already passed around. We definitely had the momentum to go out on the streets for our own EDSA.
The historical narratives of the 1986 People Power Revolution rarely, if ever, go out of the confines of Metro Manila. Sometime ago, I compiled accounts of friends who were in various points of the country to recall their own EDSAs. I had also found published accounts that had a lot of informative value. It was an educational experience of a watershed event in Philippine history.
Opposition epicenter Cebu City was an example of bravado, perhaps now gone with the demise of its outspoken actors (Inday Nita Cortes Daluz, Natalio Bacalso, Napoleon Rama, Ribomapil Holganza, et al) and the present dismal crop of corrupt politicians.
On February 22, 1986, thousands of Cebuanos filled Fuente Osmeña, the city’s central hub, to listen to Cory Aquino in an indignation rally protesting the rigging of the snap presidential elections. The professor on Martial Law History at UP Diliman, Karlo Mikhail Mongaya, keeps those memories alive as published by Rappler.
Mongaya begins with a proposition that should disturb Manila: “There is this myth spread by loyalists of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. that opposition to the Marcos dictatorship was limited to a loud minority in Metro Manila.” Among Martial Law’s 70,000 detainees were many Cebuanos, including the now National Artist Resil Mojares who was detained at the PC headquarters at Osmeña Boulevard. Cebu City had its ample share of street protests during the First Quarter Storm of 1970. Mojares had coined the year 1970 in Cebu City as “The Year of Protests.”
In 2022, journalist Inday Espina Varona organized for Rappler an episode of Voices from the Regions on the February 25 cataclysm. Inday recounted an account of the priest Felix Pasquin on what happened in Bacolod City the night news of the Marcoses’ escape had spread like wildfire. Remember that there was no social media then, no mobile phones, no computers. Yet how was the spontaneity in Bacolod City? “The people went out into the streets and filled the public plaza. There was rejoicing and dancing in the streets.”
Samar literary writer Harold Mercurio remembers those days because it was preceded in 1982 by the arrest of the priest Edgardo Kangleon, who headed the local church’s social action center in Catbalogan. Red-tagging had effectively silenced Samar’s voices of dissent (some of whom had organized street protests prior to 1986). But we were wrong about the Samar that we normally associate with the Leyte-born Imelda Marcos. Monsignor Lope Robredillo, today of the clergy of the Diocese of Borongan in Eastern Samar, recalls that Cory Aquino won the snap presidential election count in the town of Giporlos where he was then the parish priest.
When EDSA had swelled in Manila, Mercurio narrates: “There was a pro-EDSA rally at Catbalogan City. In Calbayog City, one radio station made noise of its condemnations of the Marcos regime.”
On that ecstatic night when the Marcoses fled Malacañang toting all their stolen wealth in cash and jewelry, Iloilo City celebrated that once unthinkable departure.
Journalist Nereo Cajilig Luján showed me period photographs of a massive rally on the streets of Iloilo City. Rallyists on parade, complete with drums and banners, filled all the spaces of the main thoroughfare J.M. Basa Street. It was like a spontaneous Dinagyang Festival in February. These photographs were later published in Iloilo, the Book.
In Zamboanga City — cradle of the heroic Marcos critic, the assassinated Cesar Climaco — there was a victory parade around the city on the morning of February 26. Remember this was a mere two years after Climaco was gunned down, when 200,000 mourners brought him to his grave at Abong-Abong Park. These are highly significant vignettes that never make it to our national narratives because our history is written by Manila historians incapable of writing national history in a regime of Manila-centrism.
Human rights lawyer Dexter Lopoz of the Davao Region related to me an incident he had personally witnessed in the town of Nabunturan, today the capital of Davao de Oro province. He was in high school then and he got his news from the newspapers at the school library and from the AM news on the ever-reliant transistor radio. “When the dictator Marcos was finally kicked out of the palace, I joined the Freedom March organized by the former mayor of Nabunturan Prospero Amatong.” Amatong should not just be a footnote: he was the only anti-Marcos opposition municipal mayor in the entire Mindanao; Marcos had purged him earlier in 1977.
Baguio City has a remarkable narrative because of the efforts of its esteemed filmmaker, the National Artist Kidlat Tahimik (Eric Oteyza de Guia). In his magnum opus “Why is Yellow at the Middle of the Rainbow” (Bakit Dilaw ang Kulay ng Bahaghari), the Father of Philippine Independent Cinema documented by way of an epic film diary the immersive experiences of the Cordillera people before, during, and after the heady days of February 1986.
It is a precious piece of history that even Spain’s Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid had archived as part of its fabled contemporary art collection, sharing honors with its famed and controversial “Guernica” painting of Pablo Picasso. It has been shown in various cities of the world and has been archived in India, Australia, the US, the United Arab Emirates, and a host of other reputable film archives in the world.
Bongbong Marcos now wants to live entirely in his present moment of reconquering Malacañang and savoring all its pomp and circumstance. He now asks us to do an act of forgetting. He will fail.
The fact that all these narratives of EDSA beyond Manila are being written and published will defy him. But that is not all. The imperative to remember is a social commitment across many societies of the world. Marcos Jr. will get mired in futility. He only needs to look at the Holocaust as an example.
Collective memory comes from people. Marcos Jr. and his family are suffering from what Nietzsche would call the historical fever — they want to forget those days that torment them because they were shamed before the world by their own acts. But we are not the Marcoses — EDSA does not torment our collective memory. EDSA represents the Filipino’s happy days. Happy days are not better off forgotten but days memorialized as historical remembrance.
Marcos Jr. can sign a thousand decrees to obliterate the celebration of EDSA People Power. A dozen of his family’s members can sit in political power for as long as they wish and even till kingdom come. But one caveat: they will be waging a war against a natural enemy that Shae Lifson of New York University (Collective Memory of Atrocity and Crisis) calls — humans who are historical creatures. – Rappler.com
