The men wore loose-fitting barong tagalogs; many of the women, designer dresses. The formality was appropriate for a presidential inauguration--even one called at short notice. But the dignitaries and affluent friends assembled at the Club Filipino in the Manila suburb of Greenhills merely formed a splendid backdrop for the more modestly attired guest of honor. Clad in a simple yellow dress, Corazon ("Cory") Aquino, 53, could hardly have imagined this moment three months ago, when her improbable quest for the Philippine presidency began. Her voice was calm and steady as she recited the presidential oath, her hand resting on a leather-bound Bible. "I am taking power in the name of the Filipino people," she declared. "I pledge a government dedicated to upholding truth and justice, morality and decency, freedom and democracy."
Less than twelve hours later her predecessor, Ferdinand Marcos, and his family climbed aboard four U.S. Air Force helicopters, bound for exile after more than 20 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. Aquino went on national television to assure the country that a great national crisis had been resolved. "We are finally free," she said. "The long agony is over."
The protracted and sometimes bloody effort to oust Marcos had indeed come to an end. Carried by a ground swell of popular emotion and aided by Marcos' Defense Minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, and Vice Chief of Staff, Fidel Ramos, who suddenly defected to their cause, Filipinos had mounted an essentially unarmed, democratic revolution and, perhaps to their own astonishment, triumphed. In a period of only 78 hours, as his troops and tanks backed off from confrontations with thousands of demonstrators, Marcos slipped swiftly from undisputed one-man rule to no rule at all. Just after Aquino took her presidential oath, Marcos had himself inaugurated at Malacanang; it was his last official act before fleeing to Clark Air Base, north of Manila, and thence to Guam and Hawaii.
In a fiesta of freedom, thousands of Filipinos paraded through Manila's Makati financial district under exploding fireworks and a shower of yellow confetti. On the sidewalks, vendors did a brisk business in T shirts emblazoned with CORY. Car horns honked in chorus. Occasional placards bobbed and dipped in the crowd. REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD, read one. JUST LIBERATED, read another. As cars crawled along teeming Ayala Avenue, men, women and children, priests, nuns and soldiers stopped to greet each other with a salutation that somehow captured the moment: "Happy New Year."