Recalling the February 1986 scene

The other day, we celebrated an event that happened on February 23-25, 1986, in Metro Manila, and we call it as the EDSA Revolution. For all intents and purposes, that is how history records it now, a revolution. In the phrase EDSA Revolution, EDSA is used as the modifier of the word revolution. Factually, EDSA is the initial of a long stretch of road named Epifanio de los Santos Avenue and it was somewhere at the military camps of Crame and Aguinaldo along EDSA that the incident of 29 years ago started.

My recollection of the beginning of the event would tell me that it was not anywhere near an uprising of sort. It was not about putting an end to a dictatorship and installing a new president. As I remember it, the then sitting president, Ferdinand E. Marcos, might have wanted to collar two high strung personalities, namely Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel V. Ramos. The latter, with their own intricate web of intelligence sources, got wind of the order. Perhaps, they felt that should they be arrested, that was the end of their careers. It was therefore understandable that they had to resist it with all their available resources.

Resources meant that they should, as they did, gather all their able-bodied loyal followers in a place they could call their turf. Enrile, having been at the helm of the national defense and Ramos, at the top of the armed forces, knew that at such camps as Crame and Aguinaldo, they could hold their ground even if the confrontation had to be bloody. At that point of time, it was nary a revolution and I never heard either Enrile or Ramos spoke of their act as a form of revolution.

When rumors of the position of Enrile and Ramos spread, people were concerned. An armed clash was inevitable. They knew that the fully armed Enrile-Ramos supporters would not yield their leaders to a warrant of arrest, if there was any. Indeed, they feared that a single death, from whatever side it might be, could spark a full blown armed conflict such that if there was a way to prevent a confrontation, they would do it.

Little is known that it was Mr. Agapito "Butch" Aquino, who first sounded a call to the August Twenty One Movement, ATOM, for short, to do something to thwart bloodshed. He asked his members to surround with warm bodies the camp where the Enrile-Ramos group sought refuge in the hope that the civilians would serve as a buffer between two armed corps.

Cardinal Sin was next heard on live radio making a plea similar to that of Mr. Aquino. Other radio stations joined in broadcasting the riveting event. It must be the call of the cardinal that moved people because hundreds, then later, thousands, and still later, hundreds of thousands flocked to EDSA. But, believe me, I did not hear anyone of the emerging leaders talk of a revolution. Even when, on the second day of the unraveling spectacle, the increasing number of people at EDSA prevented a column of tanks, purportedly upon orders of the then chief of staff, from enforcing the order to arrest Enrile and Ramos, no one whispered that we were on the verge of a revolution.

Available films and pictures of nuns and ordinary men and women praying in front of the tanks and offering flowers and food and rosaries and what-have-you to the personnel of the armored column would prove the specific point the people did not want the forces of government to go near where Enrile and Ramos and their supporters were holed up.

Of course, from radio broadcasts, we learned of the several units of the Armed Forces of the Philippines gradually, but in increasing frequency and numbers, marching to and joining the side of Enrile and Ramos.  But the fact that most of them just wanted a fair trial of the two leaders is now lost to our calling the event as a revolution. So, be it.

I write this recollection of mine because some sectors of our society want to reprise the so-called EDSA Revolution in their call for His Excellency President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III, to resign. Really, I do not see their point.