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After 33 years, is EDSA no longer just a place?
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After 33 years, is EDSA no longer just a place?
BY FRANCISCO S. TATAD
FEBRUARY 25, 2019
ON Saturday morning last week, several hundred left-leaning demonstrators took over a religious group’s march to the Marian Shrine on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), and set the tone for this year’s celebration of the military revolt that ousted the strongman Ferdinand Marcos on Feb. 25, 1986.
However, instead of chanting slogans against Marcos, who had been the Left’s rabid enemy for 20 years, the marchers turned to the President Rodrigo Duterte, with their new mantra: “Tayo ang EDSA, tayo ang pagasa, labanan ang diktadura.” —“ We are EDSA, we are the hope, fight the dictatorship.”
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A street no more
This gave a significant twist to the meaning of “EDSA.” From the street which in 1986 and 2001 saw a successful uprising against the government, EDSA, according to this new language, now means the people rising in protest against the government. Although their small number still obstructed the traffic, they were saying they did not have to physically occupy EDSA in great numbers anymore; all they had to do was simply march against the government. EDSA had become a noun, if not a verb, of resistance, if not revolt.
This indeed is a significant development in our language of politics. Before the 1986 EDSA revolt, the government was obliged to validate its claims before the fiercely adversarial press and the even more adversarial interaction with the masses. Plaza Miranda, the public square in front of the famous Quiapo Catholic Church in Manila, became the nation’s most popular testing ground for political ideas—it was there, even more than in the halls of Congress, where the most important national questions could be debated before the electorate. For Ramon Magsaysay, the popular seventh president of the Philippines (Dec 30, 1953 to March 17, 1957), the litmus test of any government idea was whether “one could defend it in Plaza Miranda.”
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Plaza Miranda
It was in Plaza Miranda where national candidates spoke to the nation to sell themselves and their programs of government. And it was here where the most brutal attack on free speech and the democratic electoral process was inflicted on Aug. 21, 1971, when communist agents bombed a senatorial campaign rally of the opposition Liberal Party, killing nine and wounding 95 others, including the party’s most prominent LP personalities like Gerry Roxas, Sergio Osmeña Jr., Jovito Salonga, and Ramon Bagatsing, who was running for mayor of Manila. Then-Sen. Benigno S. Aquino, the most important party official who was absent during the explosions, automatically accused Marcos of having ordered the bombing.
But Marcos rejected the accusation and rapped the communists instead as the actual perpetrators. He suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus throughout the country to round up the suspects. One year later, he proclaimed martial law to turn back the rebellion, which had spilled out into the streets and threatened to overrun the government.
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Some of the perpetrators ultimately confirmed Marcos’ claim; this was documented by Gregg Jones’ Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement, among others. The late former Senate President Salonga, one of the most, if not the most, seriously wounded of the victims, said he had come to the conclusion that the real architect and author of the crime was not Marcos, but the founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines Jose Maria Sison, with “the possible knowledge of ‘Ninoy’ Aquino.”
Mutating to EDSA
This was the last time Plaza Miranda was described in political texts as the place where political ideas were validated by the Filipino people. On Feb. 25, 1986, a military mutiny, supported by the civilian population that poured out on EDSA, and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, which issued a powerful pastoral statement that set the moral basis for the move against Marcos, forced the strongman out of Malacañang after 20 years in power. It was a bloodless uprising that ended with the strongman and his family being flown by the US Air Force to Hawaii.
Instantly, EDSA became a household word for changing an unwanted government.
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The military installed Mrs. Corazon Aquino as revolutionary president, even though she had failed to overcome Marcos in the snap presidential election of Feb. 7, 1986 and had gone into hiding with the Pink Sisters in Cebu as the EDSA revolt broke out in Manila. Despite the props provided by external actors, Cory’s government could hardly mute nor mask its inherent dysfunctions. Lacking an authentic constitutional mandate, Cory had to face an EDSA-type revolt from the same forces that had installed her in power, for at least seven times during her six-and-a-half years. The deadliest of these nearly toppled her, were it not for the timely flyover of US jet fighters at the height of the coup attempt.
Ousting Estrada
Fifteen years later, under then-President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, EDSA made a dramatic reappearance. Led by then-Speaker Manuel Villar, the rich property developer from Las Piñas, the House of Representatives impeached Estrada for bribery and corruption without much of a fight, and the Articles of Impeachment promptly went up to the Senate for trial. Estrada was represented by some of the best lawyers in the profession—Andres Narvasa, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Estelito Mendoza, former solicitor-general and secretary of justice, Raul Daza, former deputy speaker of the House where he had served three consecutive terms as congressman for the first district of Northern Samar. Then Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. presided over the trial. But the case was to be decided not on legal merits alone.
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