The sovereign people took over the streets of the national capital to pay tribute to the departed President Corazon Aquino. Her flag-draped remains plowed through a human sea of grieving multitudes while she was being transferred from De La Salle Green Hills to the Manila Cathedral Monday.
The route to the cathedral was lined by a wall of people from all walks of life, which was reminiscent of the massive crowd that gathered in the People Power Revolution of 1986 that swept out the Marcos dictatorship. It was Cory Aquino’s army that materialized en masse again in the streets on Monday—this time to demonstrate their deep affection for her instead of to overthrow a hated and corrupt dictatorship.
Cory’s Yellow People’s Army turned out in the streets, responding only to her summons and not to anyone else’s. They came out without state sponsorship, after the Aquino family rebuffed an offer of the widely-reviled Arroyo government to give Cory a state funeral.
The people, the mass constituency of Cory, took their cue from the Aquino family’s disdain for pompous state-sponsored funeral rites, and went out to the streets to render her a people’s funeral and gathered by the thousands at the wake at De La Salle and the Manila Cathedral. It was the people’s way of manifesting their revulsion towards the Arroyo administration’s machinations to revise the Constitution and bend the rules to allow the President to cling to power beyond the term defined by the 1987 Constitution, which was the handiwork and legacy of Cory’s restoration of Philippine democracy.
The People Power that reappeared in the streets since Cory’s death on Saturday and up until yesterday evening at the Manila Cathedral before her funeral was composed of a multi-class constituency that formed the critical mass of the EDSA movement in 1986. They came from the peak of the social triangle (the rich of Forbes Park and other enclaves of the wealthy), the middle class and the poorer classes in the slums and shanties of the urban poor of Metro Manila. This was the Yellow Army that confronted the armored vehicles and tanks of the Marcos regime as they made their way to EDSA (Epifanio delos Santos Avenue) to crush the military-civilian rebellion that took a defiant stand at Camp Crame in February 1986.
The only significant social group that was left out in People Power I was the Left and that was because they took the arrogant position that they won’t have anything to do with a middle-class led movement since the only revolution worth the name was the proletarian and workers’ revolution fought in the paddies and the streets drenched in blood. The Left, which did not think much of Cory because she was a daughter of a wealthy landed-class, paid heavily in political terms for their abstention from the People Power movement. They were marginalized from any power sharing with the middle and upper classes after the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship. And now the hard-core Left is withering away in exile in The Netherlands, after their EDSA blunder.
The people who joined the odyssey at EDSA went there without any prompting from the authorities. In fact, they gathered there in defiance of the military power of the Marcos regime, believing that it was time for the dictatorship to go. They stood up to be counted and risked their lives to open the gates for the restoration of democracy.
Cory Aquino was the personification of the people’s aspiration for liberty and a credible handmaiden of the movement to topple the Marcos dictatorship. At EDSA the people were united in purpose and aspirations behind a leader they believed in and trusted with firm conviction.
The amalgamation of social classes behind Cory Aquino gave a massive show of force at the Luneta when about two million people responded to Cory Aquino’s call for a boycott of the businesses owned by cronies of Ferdinand Marcos after the latter was proclaimed winner of the Feb. 7, 1986 snap election by the rubber-stamp National Assembly in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence that he had rigged the result. The mammoth rally at Luneta was the catalyst of the People Power movement. It demonstrated Cory’s drawing power among the people and the existence of the vast constituency of her Yellow Army that only she could summon in protest or to honor her memory in death.
After that rally, Philip Habib, the special envoy US President Ronald Reagan sent to Manila to offer a power-sharing formula between Marcos and Cory, left in a huff, convinced that the crisis had reached a boiling point after Cory rejected the deal. Hours after Habib’s departure, the Enrile-Ramos military mutiny broke out in Camp Aguinaldo, triggering the People Power Revolution that mobilized the people behind Cory as its rallying symbol and Jaime Cardinal Sin as its spiritual patron.
The social mixture of people who shuffled patiently in the human stream that poured into the wake at Greenhills and the Manila Cathedral is a reincarnation of the Yellow Army that was the backbone of Cory Aquino’s campaign to end the dictatorship. It is a constituency that still has strong undercurrents. Its silent tribute to Cory manifests a strong public clamor for a political leadership that exemplifies decency and honesty in public service. Most of all, the Yellow Army calls attention to the need to make the democracy restored by Cory Aquino work, especially with regard to the observance of constitutional term limits.
