OPINION | FIRST PERSON-Alex Magno: Episode
February 25, 2025
Nearly four decades ago, I joined an assorted crowd at the junction of EDSA and Ortigas Avenue. We commandeered a score of buses, locked them in tight formation and deflated their tires. The intention was to stop the tanks moving north along the highway.
With a group of scientists from UP, we were putting together of list of materials we needed to build explosives. If the tanks tried to break through our barricade, we intended to blow them up.
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This was a rebellion. The junction was our frontline. We intended to defend our barricades, albeit with the crudest weapons, against the tanks gathered at what is now the site of the EDSA shrine.
Then something happened while we were figuring out how to booby trap the buses. Led by nuns brandishing rosaries and carrying religious images, a large group began walking past our barricade to approach the bewildered Marines. A contingent of young women brought flowers and offered them to the soldiers.
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Sitting atop the buses, like time travelers from the Paris commune, we watched with amazement as the frontline simply moved by us. Unarmed civilians were crowding the tanks, some going through the motions of pushing them back. Then they knelt to pray.
We were not prepared for this. The paradigm of insurrection was shifting before out eyes. The Molotov cocktails a team was preparing at a gas station nearby suddenly became irrelevant. We who were reared in the classic leftwing conception about how revolutions happen did not know how to deal with this emerging situation.
The group that I was with decided to withdraw from the Ortigas junction and leave the front line to the prayerful crown. We walked back to the Quezon Avenue junction and started building another barricade, acting on information that another armored column was moving southwards from Central Luzon.
We were told later that an artillery barrage on the rebellious troops at Camp Crame was ordered. For some reason, those orders were not carried out. Instead, a helicopter squadron was sent over the camp. That squadron chose to defect instead, giving the rebels some air power.
We were relying on mobile teams using crude walkie-talkies and handheld radios to get a sense of what was going on. But information was scarce.
Meanwhile, the situation was evolving rapidly. More and more units of the Armed Forces were switching sides. Those that remained loyal to the Marcos government were hesitant to attack unarmed crowds.
No one planned the EDSA Uprising. There was no central command and control.
What was planned was a military coup. But that played out badly. The plan was poorly conceived and the plotters were intercepted swiftly. Those that survived gathered at Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame, unsure of what to do next. Only the spontaneous turnout in the streets saved them from being completely crushed.
For months, the non-communist cause-oriented groups I worked with had been evolving a strategy of “pressure politics.” That strategy was at best nebulous. The broad idea was to keep unarmed pressure on the dictatorship until cracks developed, mistakes are committed and factional struggles broke out. The emergence of coup conspiracy did show the authoritarian hegemony was bound to be broken.
But that military conspiracy was not going to guarantee a quick transition to democratic politics. We saw that in the coup attempts mounted against the post-EDSA political order. Had the military coup succeeded, it could have meant a more efficient and no less repressive authoritarian order.
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The mainline communist movement led by the CPP-NPA was far more detached from the rapidly evolving political situation. Trapped in a “people’s war” orthodoxy, the communists had an even worse understanding of the brewing insurrection. A rift between hardline Maoists and more inventive tendencies open to participating in “insurrectionist” options was widening.
When anti-Marcos crowds began assaulting the Palace, I found several communist cadres wandering in the streets, completely lost. Some of them were weeping in the sidelines, sensing that history had overtaken their “revolution.”
The EDSA Uprising was an unexpected confluence of events and political forces. It was a “revolution” only in the narrowest sense that it caused the expulsion of the Marcos presidency. It was a “restoration” in the broadest sense because it opened a way for the traditional political elites, the same ones that constituted the oligarchy that betrayed the nation, returned to power under some encompassing banner of “democratization.”
Every year since 1986, when February comes around, we have this largely useless debate about whether the “revolution” was betrayed by the personalities and forces that protected their entrenched interests. That debate happens only because we tend to abstract the popular uprising from its longer historical context and commemorate it as some sort of “miraculous” moment that might have allowed us to correct the sins that warped our development as a people.
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It should be more fruitful to look at the EDSA Uprising as an episode in a longer, more complex story of evolving a humane community. True, there were grand expectations that were unmet.
But the challenge is not to “redeem” an uprising created by a convergence of so many incidental factors. The challenge is to refine a vision of nationhood we could all rally around.
If there was any failure the past four decades, it was our exasperating inability to imagine the terms of national community in a more compelling way.
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THE EDITOR
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