(Due to its timeliness, we yield this space to the statement of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan – Panay. – Ed.)
TODAY, as we celebrate the 37th anniversary of the 1986 EDSA uprising, it would do us well to go beyond mere perfunctory ceremonies and citations that, while acknowledging the political significance of the event, fail to draw lessons from the nation’s collective experience and thus relegate it to a historical anomaly bereft of present-day application.
The EDSA uprising was not the result of just the grand-scale fraud that marred the 1986 snap elections, or just the assassination of the Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. three years prior, or just the call of church leaders for protesters to gather at the now-historic site. Much less do we have turncoats like Juan Ponce Enrile, Fidel Ramos, and their military cohorts who tried to grab power for themselves to thank for such a momentous occurrence.
EDSA was the culmination of years of struggle – armed and unarmed, legal and underground – waged by democratic forces throughout the entire country. This struggle was waged by activists in city streets, by workers in factories, and by students in campuses, as much as it was waged by farm workers in haciendas, by peasants and indigenous peoples in rural villages, and by rebels in forests and mountains across the Philippines. Together, they sapped the Marcos regime of its strength, spread its forces too thin, and assured the expansion of the anti-dictatorship movement.
Those who took up this cause were of various and, at times, conflicting ideological persuasions, yet, all contributed in one way or another to the fight to end tyranny and oppression. The hard-fought victory that materialized 37 years ago came at a tremendous cost both in lives and liberties lost.
Revolutionaries gave up their youth and, eventually, their lives to keep the flame of resistance burning in the dark years of Martial Law. Opposition figures were jailed for years on trumped-up charges. Many of them suffered horrific torture in the hands of state forces during years of captivity. These selfless individuals were the faces of the resistance and the struggle for social change. Had it not been for their efforts at organizing the masses, mobilizing rallies, and keeping the people’s will to fight and their desire for liberty alive, EDSA would not have happened. The victory belongs to them as much as it does to every Filipino who stood his or her ground against the onslaught of state terror.
Now, with the Marcos family back in Malacañang, with Congress and all the other agencies of government under their yoke, with the vast majority of Filipinos enduring poverty and hunger, and with many opposition leaders and activists killed, jailed or otherwise persecuted, we face challenges similar to those that confronted our predecessors.
These are challenges we can overcome if, with reflection, we realize that EDSA is a lesson on the power of willful, stubborn resistance.
