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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 Malacaang 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 Malacaang 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 Malacaang 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 Malacaang in his SUV and went on television with Arroyo. "I was playing golf," he told me later. "I got a call from Malacaang. '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.