Quotes of the Day

On Feb. 22, 1986, I threw a birthday party for my 5-year-old son at a McDonald's in Manila. A uniformed staffer tapped me on the shoulder to say I was wanted. Those were nervy days in the Philippines. Cell phones didn't exist; instead, through a phone behind the hamburger counter, a source warned me that something big was happening.

At dusk, I arrived at Camp Aguinaldo, a military facility on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA, Manila's main artery. The halls and stairwells of the Defense Ministry headquarters were in sinister shadow: no one had turned on the lights. Bands of soldiers in fatigues hustled machine guns around. They looked frightened.

They had reason to be. Those soldiers, led by Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and national police chief General Fidel Ramos, were rebelling against Ferdinand Marcos, a dictator staunchly backed by Washington, who had ruled the Philippines for more than 20 years. Marcos' military was 140,000-strong. The rebels at Camp Aguinaldo numbered 300.

Enrile and Ramos held a dramatic press conference in which they spoke of their willingness to die. Afterward, we journalists discovered we were locked inside the compound—300 soldiers weren't enough to ward off Marcos' wrath. The rebels needed a ring of human shields. We were it.

And then we received reinforcements of an almost miraculous kind. At 9 p.m., Catholic Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin went on the radio imploring Manila's residents to fill the streets surrounding Aguinaldo. They did. It was a weird sensation staring at the gathering crowd through the padlocked camp gates, chatting with people close by—but not being able to join them—and struggling to come up with the words to describe what was happening on EDSA, to Marcos, and to the Philippines.

The words came quickly: People Power. The masses stayed on the streets for three days. Marcos sent in tanks but they were blocked by idealistic students and nuns kneeling in the roadway, praying the rosary. On Feb. 25, Marcos received word that U.S. President Ronald Reagan had abandoned him. Marcos and his family clambered aboard four U.S. helicopters and noisily lifted off from the grounds of Malacañang Palace, the presidential seat.

A cunning and ruthless dictator, armed to the teeth, was vanquished by an improbable assemblage of hoi polloi in flip flops, cheeky prostitutes, socialites distributing sandwiches slapped together by their maids, and defecting army grunts who placed flowers in the barrels of their rifles. "It was very much a miracle," says Sister Teresita Burias, one of the two nuns kneeling before the tanks in the iconic photo of the People Power revolt. Agrees Fidel Ramos, who went on to become Philippine President in 1992: "I say there was a divine Commander-in-Chief who put the various bits and pieces of the puzzle together."

To say the world took notice, or was inspired, is a colossal understatement. Manila's People Power revolution changed the world as we knew it. A year later, South Koreans took to the streets to force out their dictator. The following year was Pakistan's turn. In Tiananmen Square and Rangoon, People Power was brutally suppressed; not so in Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. Corazon Aquino, the widow of slain opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr., made it a point to clad herself in yellow, and supporters followed suit—a technique used in the recent "Color Revolutions" of Georgia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

In 1986, Filipinos spontaneously invented a potent political tool that has freed tens of millions of people oppressed by their rulers. But 20 years on, the phenomenon of People Power looks good just about everywhere but the place of its birth. Democracy has failed to transport the Philippines to a prosperous or stable new world. Coup attempts by disgruntled officers and soldiers are a chronic problem. Corruption never subsided, and though the Philippines is one of the best-educated countries in Asia—92% of Filipinos are literate—the economy has never risen to Asian Tiger status. Filipinos are back to referring to their country as the "basket case of Asia," as they did during Marcos' waning days.

In the past few months, an alarming range of prominent Filipinos has gone public to insist that the only cure for the country is "revolutionary change" or "a change in the system." When they stop mincing words, they say a dictatorship would be useful, at least for a few years. People Power is a national pride, but also a curse—a Pandora's Box that, in the minds of many, should be permanently welded shut.

THE PEOPLE'S COURT
Filipinos like monuments, especially holy ones, and I recently visited the EDSA Shrine for the first time. It's a not-very-serene site squeezed between a 1990s "megamall" and EDSA's infernal traffic. From the road, the shrine's main feature is a seven-meter statue of a crowned Virgin Mary with the dove of peace on her right shoulder. Inside, mass is conducted five times a day in an air-conditioned chapel. Communicants sit beneath murals showing Ninoy Aquino's assassination, a family huddled around a radio on the night of Cardinal Sin's appeal, nuns kneeling before tanks, Cory Aquino's inauguration as President of the democratic Philippines. A plaque at the chapel entrance reads: "Here is where on Sunday the 23rd of February 1986 'the unarmed forces' of this nation met the might of troops and tanks with the power of prayer and peace."

The rooftop features the stations of the cross. It also has more than 100 blackened and battered riot shields stamped with the initials of the Eastern Police District. At first, I assumed they were the shields used by Marcos' police in 1986, but there was no explanatory sign. I wondered if they were stored on the roof as a remembrance—or for use in the future.

For the EDSA Shrine is no mere memorial to events of 20 years ago. It's where Philippine-style People Power periodically re-erupts. In January 2001, masses gathered outside the shrine to demand the ousting of another President, former film star Joseph Estrada, who had narrowly evaded impeachment on corruption charges. Estrada was a self-proclaimed rake with plenty of shady friends. Rallied by Cory Aquino, the Catholic Church and businessmen alarmed over political instability, thousands took to EDSA and paralyzed the city. The military gave up on Estrada and he was forced to flee the riverside Malacañang by motor launch. Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took the presidential oath at the shrine and her new government tossed Estrada in jail.

Many Filipinos were proud of the achievement, and couldn't see the distinction between 1986 and 2001. Yet the first People Power revolt dislodged a dictator (who never spent a day behind bars). Estrada, in contrast, had won a presidential election by a landslide, with overwhelming support from the poor, and is under house arrest to this day. That distinction registered with Estrada's supporters, who stormed Malacañang after he was arrested but were beaten back. (Arroyo served out Estrada's term and then was herself elected in 2004.) As a result of this frenzy of People Power, a whole new nomenclature is now required. The events of 1986 are known as EDSA I (pronounced uno), which led to EDSA II (dos) and, to describe the poor people's rebellion on behalf of Estrada, EDSA III (tres).

EDSA IV is entirely possible, and no one knows this better than Arroyo, who last year nearly became the first President to be installed by People Power and then extinguished by it. For Arroyo, a diminutive but tough former economics professor, 2005 was a true annus horribilis. First, her husband and her son were accused of raking in money from an illegal numbers racket—the same charge that brought down Estrada in 2001. (The Arroyo men have denied the accusation.) Then, someone in military intelligence leaked a wiretapped phone conversation in which Arroyo seemed to be arranging vote fraud with an Election Commission official during the 2004 presidential election. (Arroyo denies fixing the election, but publicly apologized to the nation for making an inappropriate phone call.) The tape went public in a big way: vendors started selling CDs on the street for 50¢ each. A creative soul set the conversation to music. People loaded it onto their cell phones as a ring tone.

The Senate ordered up hearings on the allegations against Arroyo's husband and son; the House of Representatives did the same on the bombshell tape, and eventually started impeachment proceedings. But in the Philippines' uniquely helter-skelter politics, those were the least of Arroyo's troubles. A handful of Catholic bishops demanded that Arroyo resign. Film actress Susan Roces, the widow of Arroyo's challenger in the 2004 presidential election, held a histrionic press conference at which she branded the President a liar and a cheat. Arroyo's former executive secretary demanded a "truth commission." And a respected former Defense Secretary, Fortunato Abat, called on the military to rebel—and to install him as head of a junta. All of this played out in public, covered relentlessly by the ABS-CBN News Channel, the Philippines' overworked equivalent of CNN.

Off camera, things were even nuttier as politicians and troublemakers of all stripes predicted a split in the military, mass protests around the EDSA shrine, the government's imminent collapse—and its replacement by a dictatorship. One veteran politician, after a lot of red wine in a couple of hotel lounges last summer, assured me that when his own cabal took power, I wouldn't miss the revolution even if I were back home in Hong Kong.

"Won't you have to close the airport?" I asked politely.

"We'll open up Clark Airfield for you, Tony," he said. "No—you can fly into Villamor Air Force Base. It's closer."

I didn't know how to respond to this offer of extraordinary treatment from the next dictatorship. "I don't think I'll have a plane," I replied.

"We'll send a Philippine Airlines jet for you. Believe me, it's not a question of if—only when!"

The climax of the craziness occurred last July 8, and for veterans of EDSA I, the events were like a twisted flashback. Ten of Arroyo's cabinet members indignantly resigned. Cory Aquino went on national TV to say Arroyo had lost all moral authority. I was in the Malacañang press room during Aquino's broadcast, one floor below Arroyo's residence and offices. The earnest, fatalistic reporters on the presidential beat shook their heads and started writing Arroyo's political obituary. Either she would resign, or EDSA IV would begin.

Three hours later, Fidel Ramos—whose split with Marcos doomed the dictatorship—roared into Malacañang in his SUV and went on television with Arroyo. "I was playing golf," he told me later. "I got a call from Malacañang. 'You come,' they said. I got there in an hour and a half. What I didn't know is that they had set up a live interview to respond to the events of the day." His appearance saved Arroyo's presidency.

This makes no sense outside the Philippines, and even Filipinos are bewildered. The crowned saint of People Power, Cory Aquino, brings an elected President to the precipice. Another People Power hero salvages the presidency a few hours later by appearing on TV at Arroyo's side. One obvious conclusion is that the country's institutions—the legislature, the Supreme Court—have become nearly irrelevant and that the presidency is dangerously weakened. The more pertinent fact: Arroyo's foes and friends alike keep their eyes on EDSA, the country's real court of impeachment. REBELS WITH A CAUSE
For a people power movement to succeed, two elements are required: masses on the streets, and a split between the President and the military. That truth is neatly illustrated on EDSA today: a few blocks away from Mrs. Aquino's shrine is a competing monumental statue dedicated to the military's role in 1986. It's a socialist-realist tableau of representative figures from People Power: soldiers with machine guns, a mother and child, nuns, poor people with arms raised. The overall mood is angry.

In the tumultuous months after Ninoy Aquino's 1983 assassination, a group of mid-level military officers planned a coup d'état to remove Marcos from power: the dictator was dragging the country down. Some of the brainstorming was done at the home of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile. "We were training in Quezon Province, Batangas, Zambales," Enrile recalls. "We were even training in Metro Manila. It wasn't easy." At one risky point, Marcos telephoned Enrile to say he had heard that his men were rappelling off buildings in Manila in the night. "That was true," Enrile laughs.

Twice a week, Enrile's plotters took a private dining room at the Kamayan Restaurant on EDSA, not far from Camp Aguinaldo. "They liked the lechon, the prawns and crab," recalls Sonny Velasquez, now assistant manager of the restaurant. "After we served them, we were told to leave the room. It was exclusive to them." The officers' plot was elaborate—they built a Styrofoam model of Malacañang to figure out how to seize it—but not too savvy, and ultimately Marcos got wind of it. That forced the 300 soldiers to Camp Aguinaldo on the afternoon of Feb. 22, 1986.

I held a dinner at Kamayan recently for the leaders of the group, which called itself the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, or RAM. Six of the former officers—Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan, Rex Robles, Felix "Boy" Turingan, Victor Batac, Marcelino "Jake" Malajacan and Eduardo "Red" Kapunan—hadn't gotten together in a decade. The dinner was tricky to arrange: Honasan has been implicated in a coup attempt against Arroyo in 2003—he led many of the coup attempts against Cory Aquino—and is keeping a very low profile.

We order sushi, tempura, red wine and San Miguel beer. They are a jolly group—even in despair, Filipinos are irrepressibly jolly—and the two decades that have passed are evident as they haul out reading glasses to peer at text messages on their cell phones. Honasan, who fashioned himself after Sylvester Stallone's Rambo in the 1980s, now boasts a gut. "It was not an anti-Marcos project," Honasan says of the failed putsch that unexpectedly gave birth to People Power. "It wasn't anti-anything. It was for something—change, good governance. One thing for sure: we sparked it." His message: without RAM, Cory Aquino and her crowd would never have figured out a way to topple Marcos.

I ask the men if People Power changed the Philippines for the better. Turingan, a former computer expert for the navy, puts his head in his hands and fakes sobbing. Honasan delivers an impassioned speech about the eternal rottenness of the Philippine system, how power never shifted from élite politicians, and how RAM was hoodwinked into forcing a change that didn't alter anything. "Only the dates and personalities have changed," he says. The men mourn the fact they didn't take full control in 1986, install a figurehead "reconciliation council," and suspend democracy for up to three years—to re-engineer the Philippines. Concludes Honasan: "Can you imagine how stupid and romantic and impractical we were?" Honasan's favored solution: two or three years of martial law, such as Marcos instituted in 1972.

AN INCOMPLETE REVOLUTION
Twenty years on, many Filipinos have concluded that democracy is stupid, romantic and impractical in their country. Democracy hasn't delivered the goods, and there's much discussion over why. Two years after People Power, Senator Leticia Shahani, Fidel Ramos's sister, published an official report on the flaws in the national character of the Philippines. It made for discouraging reading: Filipinos are passive, unreflective, undisciplined, and prone to loyalty toward personalities rather than institutions or ideals. Shahani's view was that those flaws had to be corrected for a democratic nation to thrive. The national character hasn't changed, of course, and Filipinos are back to saying that people "get the leaders they deserve"—a common refrain in the days of Marcos. Filipinos deserved the dictator, and they deserve the current mess.

There are other ways of viewing the problem. Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew chastises the Philippines for its disorder, but he doesn't seem to view it as an issue of national character. To Lee, unfettered democracy is the flaw, and that's why Singapore doesn't allow some of the freedoms Filipinos take for granted. Yet it's all too easy to overlook the good that was ushered in after the Marcos dictatorship ended. Death squads no longer roam cities shooting human-rights lawyers. Since 1986, a communist insurgency has been in deep retreat, and thousands of Muslim separatists in the country's south have been co-opted into the democratic system. The writ of habeas corpus is restored. The Philippine press, spineless until 20 years ago, is now unrestrained, gleefully irresponsible, but the liveliest media in Asia.

However, the writers of the 1987 post-People Power constitution appear to have made a blunder. They settled for a U.S.-style presidential system but restricted the Philippine President to a single five-year term. This was supposed to prevent a future leader from clinging to power as Marcos did. There were several unintended consequences. A good president, such as Ramos, who pacified the restive military and liberalized the overly protected economy, couldn't be re-elected, and the electorate lost out on one of the satisfactions of democracy: throwing a bum out of office—except by People Power.

Ramos thinks the solution is to change the constitution, to replace the presidential system with a parliament. In fact, he's demanding it as payback for his support to Arroyo last July. Officially, Arroyo has agreed, but she's dragging her heels so as not to cut short her own presidential term, which ends in 2010. Their logic: in a parliamentary system, the government can be pulled down legally at any time without resorting to People Power; and if the country doesn't have an administration with a fixed term, politicians eager for their time at the trough will have no reason to whip up crowds on EDSA. People Power was the country's contribution to history, a true gift to the world. For the Philippines, it was everything, and yet not enough.

• Anthony Spaeth
• Twenty years ago, People Power in the Philippines toppled a dictator and inspired democratic change around the world. But at home, the promise of better times remains unfulfilled