There are several groups today that are planning rallies based on the experience of the EDSA and EDSA 2 People Power during the time of Ninoy and Cory Aquino. There are even discussions on whether there was an EDSA 3 and similar occurrences in history.
As far as I am concerned, the EDSA and EDSA 2 gatherings were actually People Power movements. They were the only real People Power in Philippine history. There have been attempts to imitate but none have succeeded. Now there are people planning rallies and some are even holding it at the former EDSA People Power site. But one has to understand how the original People Power Revolution really started.
Firstly, People Power cannot be planned and EDSA was not planned at all. Let me tell you a story of how I know that this was true.
The leading opposition political party in the 1980s was the PDP headed by Nene Pimentel and the LABAN headed by Ninoy Aquino. When the two merged, it became PDP-LABAN. It is very different from the PDP-LABAN of today.
After the assassination of Ninoy in August 1983, other NGOs and other cause-oriented groups also joined the movement for the restoration of democracy. In order to coordinate all the rallies that were taking place, an organizing body met regularly in an office building along Pasay Road, which I recall to be at that time the office of Mofire owned by Butz Aquino. Occasionally, the main leaders of the movement coming from different cause-oriented groups would meet with Cory Aquino in the Cojuangco Building also in Makati.
I was present in all the meetings because at that time I was the deputy secretary general for Metro Manila of PDP-LABAN. In none of these meetings do I ever recall a proposal to gather at EDSA. Our biggest rally at that time was the one we organized at the Luneta, which gathered hundreds of thousands of rallyists. This was part of the protests against the massive cheating in the recently concluded presidential elections.
At that time, there were no cellphones or internet. All the radio stations except for one were controlled by the government or Marcos cronies. The only exception was the Radio Veritas owned by the Catholic Church. One Wednesday in February 1983, there was a meeting of representatives from the different opposition groups and other sectors like the business sector that had become involved in the campaign for the election of Cory Aquino for president. The main topic was to discuss what would be the next step in the ongoing struggle. We were told that it had been decided through a consensus that during the next week, there would be a one-day general strike.
So those of us present at that meeting were of the impression that our main task was to spread the word and urge everyone to produce their own propaganda leaflets calling for a general strike.
I distinctly remember that that Saturday, I was visiting several groups in Parañaque to ask them to join the planned general strike. As soon as I got home, I received several phone calls to listen to the radio because Cardinal Sin was asking people to go to EDSA and stay in front of Camp Crame to protect members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines led by Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, who had withdrawn support from the Marcos administration and had sought refuge in Camp Crame.
I immediately called a few friends and we proceeded to EDSA. I can tell you that there were very few of us that first night. I can vividly remember the business leader Jimmy Ongpin, who saw me seated on the sidewalk and he came over to talk to me. Our topic was how to make more people come the following day.
This became immaterial because the following day, Sunday, people came by the hundreds of thousands until the crowd reached more than a million. Again, this was when there were no social media or cellphones. Aside from Radio Veritas, the main means of communication was word of mouth.
I decided to tell this story to emphasize again that a true People Power movement comes from the desire of the people and not by the machinations of an elite group of political leaders. The personalities involved in the current political bickering should stop using the martyrdom of Ninoy Aquino and the symbolic meaning of the EDSA Shrine for their narrow personal political interests.
In a recent statement by the Aquino family on the occasion of Ninoy’s 92nd birthday , one sentence emphasizes: “However, until his last days, Ninoy believed in peaceful resistance and in 1986, this freed us from the oppression and greediness of the dictatorship.”
I believe that we will never duplicate the EDSA Revolution of 1986 until we have a major political figure who will again unselfishly offer his life in martyrdom in the belief that the Filipino is worth dying for.