AS THE national celebrates the 29th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolt, we are reprinting articles of the PCIJ based on interviews with 20 people who took part in the campaign that eventually ousted former President Ferdinand E. Marcos. The articles were first published on the PCIJ iReport magazine. Below is the cover story written by PCIJ founding Executive Director Sheila S. Coronel.
FORMER PRESIDENT CORAZON C. AQUINO | ‘All of us Filipinos have to make sacrifices’ | Photo by Lilen Uy
TWENTY YEARS ago, at the height of the people power revolt, Imelda Marcos, then holed up in Malacañang with her anxious family and a phalanx of remaining loyal troops, contemplated the possibility of her imminent, and vertiginous, fall. At about the same time, Cory Aquino, who had returned to Manila after taking shelter in a Carmelite convent in Cebu when the uprising broke out, was insisting to worried family and friends that she should join the throng that had gathered at Edsa despite the security problems that would pose.
FORMER PRESIDENT FIDEL V. RAMOS: ‘The people are tired of constant political bickering’ | Photo by Jay Directo
While all this was going on, Bernabe ‘Ka Dante’ Buscayno, the legendary founder of the New People’s Army who had been rotting in a Marcos prison inside Camp Crame, was glued to his radio, following the events taking place just outside his cell and fervently wishing, “Please, please, let this end, let Marcos fall.”
FORMER FIRST LADY IMELDA R. MARCOS:
‘The greatest moment of Marcos was Edsa’ | Photo by Lilen Uy
Not far away but lost among the crowd that massed up outside Camp Crame was Nanay Mameng Deunida, a diminutive laundrywoman and feisty community leader from the teeming Manila slum of Leveriza. She was at Edsa as she had been in numerous other protests against Marcos. Sister Luz Soriano, an Assumption nun, was there, too, preparing sandwiches when the tanks came. She thought she would die in Edsa, but the soldiers manning the armored vehicles were daunted by the crowd of unarmed civilians before them and refused to fire.
FORMER COLONEL, NOW SENATOR GREGORIO ‘GRINGO’ B. HONASAN: ”The military, once it intervenes, cannot go back to the barracks’ | Photo by Lilen Uy
Chito Gascon, then president of the University of the Philippines student council, was among the many young people who joined the revolt. He, too, thought that the end was near when the helicopter gunships hovered overhead, aiming at the crowd below. Instead, the pilots turned around, landed, and joined the rebel troops at the camp. Joe Concepcion, a wealthy industrialist who helped organize the election watchdog Namfrel was at Edsa as well, basking in the warmth of a celebratory crowd, some of whom hoisted the robust businessman on their shoulders while joyously shouting, “Namfrel! Namfrel!” Atom Araullo was then only three years old, but he was there, too, carried not by a jubilant crowd but by his activist parents who were eager to see Marcos go.
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