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 Malacaang 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.