In between static noises and garbled broadcasts from shortwave dial of British Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Veritas on AM radio, I was left wondering how the massing up of forces at the Epifanio del los Santos Avenue (Edsa) in 1986 will eventually end up.

I was a month or so detached from the urban centers, invited to a lengthy meeting with communist rebels deep into the rugged and unforgiving terrain of Malungon in Sarangani.

There were no cellular phones then, no internet, no Facebook, not even the 80s iconic beeper gadgets.  About the only high-tech mode of communication were two-way handheld radios which have very limited range, if not gone, once you are deep down the ravine and crevices of the mountains.

As the spontaneous, then organized, warm bodies swarmed and swelled at Edsa, I thought it was a matter of time before the Marcos dictatorship is finally ousted.

On February 25, both BBC and Radio Veritas confirmed Marcos had indeed fled after several false announcements and a new government has taken over.

But it took me another ten days to finally absorb what took place in the urban centers following the ouster of the hated Marcos regime.

What went before

Going back in time, or three years before, I was on my way to Koronadal City carrying a copy of Manila Bulletin where a man in white bush jacket laid spread out, face down, on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport was splashed on its banner photo.

It was a grim photo of former Senator Benigno Aquino III who was assassinated upon his arrival in the country on August 21, 1983 after living in exile for several years in the US.

Most local radio stations in General Santos City did not give full details of the assassination on that day.  Only the Catholic-run dxCP covered the event, intermittently hooking up live with Radio Veritas.

But silence, apprehension and fear pervaded in the air.

Marcos, then reported to be ill, was fending off growing opposition, both armed and unarmed, to his repressive regime.

The arrival of Aquino would have galvanized and unified the bourgeois opposition which was increasingly being driven to join ranks with Marcos nemesis – the Underground Left represented by the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military arm, the New People’s Army.

Two years earlier, in 1981, before the arrival of the late Pope John Paul II in the country, Marcos was forced to announce the “lifting” martial law as mounting international pressure hounded his regime.

Elsewhere throughout the country, students, peasants and workers were increasingly getting bolder, defying the machinery of martial law regime and calling for the ouster of the dictator.  This coincided with the rapid growth of the NPA guerrillas in the countryside.

The assassination of Aquino, far from stemming the flow of protests and armed resistance, instead stoked the fire of people’s anger.

Organized and spontaneous protests raged throughout the country.

The middle class and a section of the ruling elite were opening up to join forces with the Left, the only organized opposition that persisted and thrived under Martial Law.

The Left, in fact, made countless supreme sacrifices to include former moderate student standout Edgar Jopson who was killed in a military raid in a communist rebel safehouse in Davao City in 1982, poet Emmanuel Lacaba who was gunned down in the late 70s in Davao del Norte, the murder tribal leader and Cordillera anti-dam activist Macli-ing Dulag and many others.

In Davao City, struggling journalist and part-time professor Alexander Orcullo was gunned down by suspected government-sponsored paramilitary forces while on his way home.  His funeral march attracted more than 20,000 mourners in Davao City, then the hotbed of urban partisan as well as guerrilla warfare in the country.

The NPAs, on the other hand, have grown in military strength, able to maintain company-size main regional guerilla units (MRGU) and platoon-size mobile front guerilla forces (FGUs).   In other parts of Mindanao, the NPAs were able to mobilize battalion-size tactical offensives.

In 1984, the NPAs in Far South Mindanao Region (FSMR) were already bold enough to conduct checkpoints at the village center of Banate in Malungon and were engaging state security and paramilitary forces in pitch battles throughout their “territory.”

Several businessmen and prominent personalities in General Santos City, enraged by the continued stay of the repressive Marcos, joined the local protest movement.  Now fishing tycoon Marfenio Tan and friend Dario Lauron and Manny Yaphockun were regular fixtures of rallies and welgang bayan (people’s strike)

By 1985, Marcos was so isolated both domestically and internationally that he was forced to announce a snap election while being interviewed live by ABC’s Ted Koppel.

Last card

Having exhausted all his hands, Marcos felt a fresh mandate will legitimize his dictatorial rule.

But although protests and opposition to his regime were mounting, the late strongman was able to keep the military in check and still was in control of the defunct National Assembly.   He relied on his state apparatus to continue to prop up his regime.

Until massive fraud and deliberate attempt to rig the 1986 snap election led to the walkout of tabulators and calls for civil disobedience snapped the thinning patience of the Filipino people.

By then the economy was in tatters.  Capital flight was driving the country into bankruptcy.  Prolonged and sustained political turmoil was pushing the country to its knees.

Still, Marcos refused to bow down.

Unknown to him, Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos’ trusted defense minister, and his clique were plotting to oust him in a violent coup.

The timely discovery of the alleged plot, while saving Marcos for several days, however also hastened his downfall.

Enrile and his group of young junior officers, aware that Marcos was closing in and was about to arrest them, made a hasty retreat in Camp Aguinaldo and contacted then Philippine Constabulary chief Lt. Gen. Fidel Ramos to make a last stand against their former benefactor.  Ramos promptly joined them and called other units in the police and military to defy and withdraw their support from Marcos.

When words of Enrile and Ramos defying the Marcos regime spread out, the late Jaime Cadinal Sin made a sober, then later frantic, appeal for people to mass up at Edsa and support the beleaguered former Marcos allies who were then holed up in Camp Aguinaldo.(see this link: http://www.inquirer.net/specialfeatures/edsa20/view.php?db=0&article=20060220-66773)

The appeal later reverberated across the country and within four days after Sin made his call, more than a million Filipinos filled up Edsa and many other plazas across the country.

Major tactical error

Back in the denuded mountains of Malungon, senior cadres of the CPP in the newly-formed FSMR Party Committee dismissed the ouster of the Marcos as a bourgeois upheaval even though the communists would later admit they were smarted by the disastrous decision of the central party leadership to boycott the snap election.

At the time, party organs at the regional and territorial levels were also facing their own upheaval of sorts. Debate within the party leadership on the “two-line struggle” was beginning to create ideological divide as well as organizational fissure.

By the late 1985, military setbacks were occurring with alarming frequency, especially in Mindanao.  Senior cadres were being “arrested and neutralized” by state forces with unabated regularity.

This prompted suspicions that the underground movement was infiltrated by deep penetration government agents (DPAs).

By the time Cory Aquino assumed the presidency following the ouster of Marcos, the Underground Left in Mindanao was not only fending off criticisms for its boycott policy, it was also starting to launch a campaign to purge the party with suspected DPAs.

The National Democratic Front (NDF) would later admit that the “Kahos”, Kampanyang Ahos or anti-Zombie Campaign, nearly decimated the rebel ranks and many innocent cadres were senselessly killed in the violent witch hunt that followed.

In a terse admission more than a decade later, the Mindanao Commission of the CPP-NPA admitted its errors and apologized to the victims of the misplaced purging.  It also offered to compensate the victims of the Kahos atrocities.  In all, close to 600 cadres, activists and supporters were reportedly killed in the campaign.

The CPP-NPA has since launched a “rectification campaign” to rid the party of disgruntled ideologues who advocated urban insurrection in lieu of a protracted war.  Incidentally, those who rejected the original ideological platform of the CPP-NPA were labeled as “rejectionists” while those who affirmed the protracted war principle called themselves as “re-affirmists.”

Today, the debate has been settled.  Those who rejected the rectification campaign were expelled from the party.

New faces then back to the old

When I trekked backed to General Santos City on March 6, 1986 following the Edsa I Revolt, the atmosphere was still festive.

The first thing I did was open our then black and white console television which was broadcasting replays of the Edsa revolt more than a week earlier.

Then interior minister Aquilino Pimentel Jr, upon orders of Aquino, later replaced majority of Marcos-era local government officials with handpicked officers-in-charge, most of them veterans of the anti-Marcos protest movement.

In General Santos City, human rights lawyer Dominador Lagare was named OIC mayor replacing Antonio Acharon while former Mindanao State University professor Rosalita Nuñez was appointed vice mayor.  Many broadcast journalists critical of the Marcos regime were also appointed OIC councilors.  Among them were dxCP broadcasters Philip Salarda and Beth Bairoy-Bagonoc.

In South Cotabato, Ismael Sueno was named OIC governor along with the late human rights lawyer Vicente Mirabueno as his vice governor.

Mirabueno would later resign to run for Congress under the newly-ratified 1987 Constitution.  He lost to Adelbert Antonino and was gunned down later in the same year.

Sarangani was then still part of South Cotabato and the late James Chiongbian regained his old seat in the reconstituted House of Representative in the same election year.

Chiongbian later authored a bill creating Sarangani as a separate province from South Cotabato in 1992.  Chiongbian served for three consecutive terms as the first congressman of the lone legislative district of Sarangani.

Lagare ran for mayor the following year but was defeated by Nuñez.

Today, the last of the prominent anti-Marcos activists in the city are gone following the retirement of Lagare from politics in 2007.  Nuñez have lost three consecutive elections and is now a political non-entity in the city.

In their places in local politics are the Antoninos and the Acharons headed by Pedro Acharon Jr.  Both came from families that were staunch Marcos loyalists.

Antonino, in fact, ran as candidate of the Marcos-era Kilusang Bagong Lipunan in 1987.

The names ring a bell

As in General Santos, the old elite – the oligarchs as Marcos described them – in the country have also made successful comebacks.

While legal and political luminaries in the mold of the Dioknos, the Salongas, the Tañadas who represent the better side of nationalists are gone, the old landed elite are still here and still hold sway over the country’s political and economic landscape.

The Marcoses, in fact, have found reinstatement and rehabilitation.  Namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Jr is now a senator and may yet become the third second generation of politicians who followed either their fathers or mother as president of the country -  the first two being Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and now Benigno Aquino III.

The octogenarian Enrile is still the Senate President while Ramos is enjoying his retirement bliss.

For all the sacrifices made by people who made the 1986 Edsa Revolt possible, the country is still stuck in the quagmire of poverty, albeit the 2000s variety.

What Edsa resolve was the contradiction between and among the ruling elite.  It did not resolve the fundamental differences between the basic masses and the ruling class.

Exactly twenty five years after, the spirit of the Edsa is still wanting but many are trying to rewrite it to suit their own version of the event.

Twenty years from now, what will history tell us about the events that led to the Edsa Revolt?