A contemporary reading of EDSA People Power as a milestone in the country’s history blurs the conceptual conflict between dictatorship by one-man authoritarian rule and democracy as a theater for people empowerment in the affairs of the state. Deposed President Ferdinand Marcos’ poor health shortened the political timeline of a publicly-perceived corrupt “conjugal” leadership and its variant human rights atrocities against those up in arms militating for change.
That from the outline is a fairly balanced overview of the situation then obtaining before anything triggered certain quarters of society, not the least, the military establishment to plunge into mutiny. At bottom, the Enrile-Ramos tandem’s call for people as human shields on EDSA was an unapologetic act of cowardice or self-preservation in what they imagined an imminent bloodbath — if FM acceded to General Fabian Ver’s advice.
In reflection, a few presuppositions have to be put forth not so much as to rewrite history any more than, at least, mitigate the effects of discombobulated narratives by romanticist authors, viz:
1) It hardly altered the social and political landscape toward any clear shift from a dictatorial regime to a more manifestly democratic reign;
2) It didn’t arrest the continuing moral decomposition of society writ large; and
3) It succumbed to the wrongly held belief that Cory’s ascent was the “best of all possible worlds.”
One year after EDSA saw the writing of a new 1987 Philippine Constitution that has never left the vestiges of the “Revolutionary Government” that momentarily “sanctioned” Cory’s ascent to power. It was luminous that the creation of the Philippine Commission on Good Government, for example, has been a failed mechanism of running after the assets, nay wealth, of the so-called conjugal partnership.
Cory’s public officials, in exercise of blanket authority to seize anything that might belong to Marcos, evidently resorted to an entirely “fascist” scheme or tact short of taking the law into their own hands. For another, Cory legalized the Communist Party of the Philippines and let its leaders and cadres get out of jail.
Neither did the “post-Marcos era” usher us into the future we may have all dreamed of. Now, thirty-seven years have passed but we have yet to see a “hundred flowers blooming.”
Presidents that followed like Cory, FVR, Erap, GMA, PNoy, even DU30, all but failed to bring to the democratic surface the developmental agenda that should have come to fruition by now. Instead, the whole complexion of development approached from social, economic, political, regional growth perspectives continues to suffer from the same scabies.
How indeed can we benefit from a level playing field that is supposed to have broadened the democratic participation of all sectors of society when all contracts and concession agreements entered into by government with private sector proponents are seen to have landed in the hands of the same elites? The question that remains unanswered each time we celebrate an EDSA People Power anniversary as a “milestone” to be revered is on whether it has actually made us better off than worse off.
In its most generic sense, it was simply a conspiracy plot ably and smoothly put in operation by the same ruling elites under guise of a popular agenda for reform and change that was never to take place anyway, not with the ascendancy or ascent of a new political player at the highest helm.
The ouster of Erap that ushered in PGMA only aggravated this moral decay, this corruption in government. Worse, the luminous class conflict between the elites only seeks the same capitalist objective by crony oligarchs and rent-seekers.
The multi-dimensional havoc populist movements inflict, however romanticized as a “fight for freedom,” is left unaccounted for as if the means were within constitutional bounds. As soon as new political players take the reins of government, they do so with a keen interest to “rewrite history” through their own colored lenses and points of view.
Our fragile democracy is still under siege.