The Success and Failure of the EDSA Revolution
by Fr Shay Cullen
EDSA, 22-25 February 1986
It’s the 30th anniversary of the non-violent people’s power ‘revolution’ that toppled the cruel and bloody Marcos dictatorship in 1986. Ironically, the son and namesake of Ferdinand E. Marcos called ‘Bongbong’, who is a senator, is making a strong bid with powerful financial backing for Vice President this election year 2016. For some, it is terrifying to see that a once political T-Rex, thought to be extinct, can make a comeback. If elected, he is only a heartbeat from becoming president should the president have health problems or resigns.
Who would have thought that the bloodiest tyranny and economic disaster to befall the Philippines would ever be so quickly and easily forgotten and overwhelmed by clever and consistent propaganda of the Marcos family and their cronies?
Today, the new generation of Filipinos has little knowledge or awareness of the events and human suffering of that dictatorship that was propped up by the United States of America. Then Vice President, later President, George Bush Sr of the USA, while on an official visit to the Philippines, praised to high heavens the Marcos regime by saying, ‘We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes’.
At the same time, hundreds if not thousands of dissenting and protesting Filipinos were being disappeared, tortured and murdered by the Marcos death squads and those of his cronies. The traditional ruling oligarchy of dynastic families who owned and controlled the country, the one percent more or less, were driven into exile or jailed and lost their economic power, and their business empires were taken over by Marcos and his followers.
Continue here.