Becoming people power

The arrest of Sen. Leila de Lima on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Edsa People Power Revolution—on elaborate charges based on the controversial testimony of convicted drug lords—forces us to take a hard look at that turning point in history. Is there a straight line that leads from the extraordinary events of those four days in 1986 to De Lima’s cell in the special custodial center in Camp Crame? Or is there rather a loop, a warping in history’s very fabric, that returns us—all of us, not just President Duterte’s most prominent critic—back to the days before Edsa?

Edsa was, in name and in fact, a revolution. Not in the sense of the most famous revolutions in history, but a revolution nevertheless: It caused the overthrow of a violent regime with very little violence, overhauled the political structure, and invented a new form of citizen participation.

That its nature was that of a revolution was simply assumed by the millions of people who filled that stretch of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue from Santolan to Ortigas Avenue, and by the millions more who followed the dramatic turn of events on radio throughout the country. There was simply nothing else like it in the history books: Millions of civilians happily putting themselves at risk, in front of tanks, to save a group of military rebels on the say-so of a cardinal. In the very act of doing it, the people knew they were doing something unique, revolutionary.

Did a straight line lead from the toppling of the Marcoses to De Lima’s incarceration? It is possible to point to the many missed opportunities as signposts in that path: The welcome extended to former Marcos devotees who had found a new religion (caricatured for all time by an editor in chief of the Inquirer, as “balimbing,” the many-sided fruit). The incomplete restructuring of the political system, which had resumed old traditions (for instance, numbering the first new Congress as the 8th) but at the same time defined itself through a new Constitution. The failure to strengthen the government agencies and nongovernment organizations recognized by the Constitution as a necessary counterweight to the political and economic elite. The continuing inability to shield government service, especially in the judiciary, from political pressure.

Some people have already justified De Lima’s arrest as the system simply asserting itself. With a new administration in power, they say, it was only to be expected. Those who oppose the new administration had it coming.

But—here’s an alternative—does a twisted loop rather connect Edsa with the events of the last three days? That is to say, is De Lima’s arrest an aberration, a repudiation of the Edsa experience?

Edsa was a reclaiming—a recovering of our lost freedoms, a rediscovery of our pride as a people, a retaking of the instrumentalities of law that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos had abused. In that light, De Lima’s arrest on dubious procedural grounds and the filing of several cases of suspect provenance against her must be understood as a return to the worst of Marcos’ pseudolegal tactics. The government abusing its powers to harass a political opponent: This is not only pre-Edsa behavior; it is anti-Edsa.

In the beginning, at the first glimpse of the people coming together, the phenomenon was simply and naturally called “people’s power.” That was how Fidel Ramos, the general who led the breakaway from the Marcos regime, first described it. And that was how the first references, even the first books, rendered it. But the alternative way of calling it quickly became standard. As the journalist and historian Timothy Garton Ash, who chronicled the revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s, wrote: It was “the toppling of the

Marcoses in the Philippines in 1983-1986, which gave us the wonderful Filipino-English term ‘people power.’”

In other words, there was a process; through our experience, people’s power became people power. We had made it distinctively our own.