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NOVEMBER 17, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 45 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK Looking Back Power To The People: MANILA, FEBRUARY 1986
Yellow was the color of revolution. And yellow was everywhere on the streets of Manila. "My resignation is impossible," thundered Philippine leader Ferdinand Edralin Marcos at his fourth and final presidential inauguration, a strangely spartan affair. But across town another president, a widow in a yellow dress, had already been chosen. Cheated in the election just two weeks previously, Filipinos looked their dictator squarely in the eye and cast another vote. For 20 years Marcos had ruled the Philippines by election or by martial decree. But with the latest ballot blatantly rigged, the president and his cronies enriched, the economy in ruins and the complicated legacy of a powerful leader already destroyed, the people took an indomitable spirit into the streets and demanded change. For four days along the capital's main artery, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue — or EDSA — about 1 million Filipinos from all walks of life made an extraordinary stand that came to be known as People Power. Together they observed the plea for a peaceful insurrection by their Catholic church leader, Jaime Sin. Lying side by side they blocked the tanks sent to crush Marcos's chief deserters, defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile and armed forces deputy chief of staff Fidel Ramos. United they pledged their immediate future to Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, a housewife whose grief and outrage over the 1983 murder of her husband, leading Marcos rival Benigno Aquino, had ignited the slow burn of national mutiny. With one voice, they told Marcos to go. It could have been a bloodbath. Yet in the end, ill and demoralized, Marcos went softly to exile in the United States. "Even the best actor knows when to take his final bow," said Aquino last week, as she joined Sin and Ramos to seek the peaceful demise of another unraveling presidency. Write to Asiaweek at mail@web.asiaweek.com
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