I thought I was done writing about EDSA but as it turns out, I was not. Why? Because the Yellowidiots are foaming at the mouth again as the 36th Anniversary of their “People Power Revolution” draws close.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is running for President on a theme of UNITY. The opposition claims that Marcos does not have a clear governance platform. True in some respect. But if you watched the SMNI Presidential Debate, Marcos acquitted himself well enough though he cannot be compared to the brilliance of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
Thirty-six years after Marcos was ousted in a civil-military coup, the Filipino people are still divided. Not down the line but it is the majority against the minority. The 1987 Constitution did away with the two-party system. Prior to martial law, there was a revolving door between the Nacionalista and Liberal Party’s. A candidate who had a good chance of winning the Presidency but could not secure the party nomination only had to defect to the other party and he would become the chosen Presidential candidate.
The two party’s were made up of power blocs which controlled the country’s political and economic environments. It was not about ideology at all. It was all about power and money. There were no real government reforms after independence until Marcos was elected President. Even the rebuilding of destroyed infrastructure only began in earnest twenty years after the war ended.
It was not Marcos who thought of martial law to extend his term. Marcos made the decision as early as 1969 when he was frustrated with the opposition-controlled Congress which would not cooperate in passing his legislative agenda. Marcos’ solution was the 1971 Constitutional Convention which sought to make amendments to the 1935 Constitution.
Martial law was the product of the instigation of Ninoy Aquino among Jose Maria Sison and Nur Misuari to launch the communist insurgency and the Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao. Aquino wanted to succeed Marcos after his second term ended in 1973 but he was unsure if he could succeed given that Marcos was grooming Imelda as his successor.
Aquino was not going to give way to other opposition stalwarts such as Jovito Salonga and Gerardo Roxas, who were his partymates. Ninoy thought of himself as the better qualified between the two because he had the looks, the charisma, the oratorical skills and the pragmatism to wield the levers of power. Aquino was in fact, the stereotype of the political warlord of those times.
As mentioned by Gerardo Sicat in his paper, The Economic Legacy of Marcos, Apo Lakay’s single biggest mistake was not planning for appointing his successor when his health began to suffer because of lupus. Marcos opted for dynastic succession as early as 1978 when Imelda was elected a member of parliament and given the post of Minister of Human Settlements and Metro Manila Governor. Sicat describes how Imelda began to establish her own power base among politicians throughout the country and pushing for her own development projects and appropriating programmed projects as her own. She was in fact, laying the groundwork for an Imelda Presidency.
EDSA 1986 was not a revolution. It was a civil-military coup. The 1983 assassination of Ninoy Aquino was no more an assassinate-me plot because of his failing heart. Ninoy could not get a heart transplant in the US because he needed to be an American citizen to become the recipient of a heart transplant. The groundwork was laid for his bloody homecoming and the timeline was the Marcos government would fall within a year. But it had been two years and Marcos held his government together despite the squeeze put on him by the US.
This is not to say that Marcos was as clean when it came to corruption. The evidence proves otherwise but the same can also be said of the then opposition after they took power. There were corruption scandals galore. The AFP was fragmented. There were two serious coup attempts against the Cory administration. The last would have succeeded if the Americans had not intervened to save her government.
The Yellows used Marcos and his family as the bogeyman for their failures. They were a convenient punching bag. The same was true with Erap and GMA. Each and every time, it was not their fault that they failed to deliver on their promised reforms until the Filipino simply tired of it and elected Rodrigo Duterte as President in 2016. This was the Filipino’s middle finger against the Yellows who continue to think that it is their destiny and right to impose their will on the majority who do not know better. The Filipino simply tired of the self-entitlement and the self-righteousness.
In the process, the opposition turned Marcos into an underdog and Filipinos love underdogs. Their middle finger to the Yellows now carries the image of Marcos. The political coalition around Marcos is the Coalition of the Wronged. They who have been wronged by the Yellows in the thirty years they were in power. They who did not deliver on their promises.
EDSA became a nightmare with the ascent of Noynoy Aquino the Presidency. It was he who opened the eyes of the Filipino people to the real character the Yellows. Nothing was about the country and its people. It was all about them. This is why the recitation of the litany of the many “sins” of Marcos, Arroyo, Duterte and Estrada do not resonate with the average Pinoy anymore.
The worst nightmare of the opposition has become a reality and they still do not have it in them to take a good long look at themselves in the mirror and admit that their time is up and it is their turn to be given an ignominious exit.
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