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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'tat 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 Malacaang 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 lite 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.