February days in 1986

There was something unreal for those of us who were abroad on those crucial days in February 1986. To us who had been in exile for 20 years the question of whether an uprising against the Marcos dictatorship was at all possible.

But it did happen. Except that it was not as we had expected it would.  

After all the rhetoric of the revolution was on the side of poor Filipinos and overseas workers among them. At the top of the opposition against Marcos were the elite or the oligarchy but their motives were shielded by revolutionary rhetoric.

The Aquinos and the Lopezes were now partners as leaders of the opposition based in the United States. We were cheering one oligarch government for another while they vied for American support which was then staunchly pro-Marcos. The Philippine government had moved from the Marcos-Lopez political team to Aquino-Lopez. It was the same oligarchy we were fighting against but it took a long time to realize that if we wanted a more just society based on a democratic meritocracy will take more than sloganeering and cheering. During the entire period of opposition to the Marcos regime, we were in a contradictory situation. We were out of the political game that would lead only to a putsch – a from Marcos-Lopez to an Aquino-Lopez team. We were the cheerleaders.

We were revolutionary and fought hard in those days for change. It never dawned on us that eventually we would end up be victims as well in the so called February revolution.

Once more we are into February and are expected to celebrate a revolution that never was. As the years went by EDSA celebration lost much of its allure and the crowds have became smaller and smaller. EDSA was not the revolution –  albeit “peaceful” – that we thought it was. It was quite simply the transfer of power in government that under the unitary presidential system would lead to even greater wealth for the victors, with the oligarchy in power.

My family and I were still in London when the series of events that led to the ouster of Marcos was happening. We did our own revolt there. When I was appointed to be a member of the EDSA people power revolution during former President Gloria Arroyo’s term, I went to a few meetings and eventually resigned.

“Marcos: The Verdict” will be launched soon. Here is an excerpt from the new book.

“My family and I also returned after the EDSA Revolution in February 1986. But it was not quite the homecoming I had expected. I now know that I suffered from an exile’s imaginings of what homecoming would be. I thought it would be one of joy and triumph and that there would have been no cause for regretting the long years of homesickness. Those are the illusions of exiles returning home.

When I arrived, I looked for those who had been our friends during the struggle, the oppositionists who sought shelter in my home in London (it became known as the Pedrosa Hilton because board was free). There was Geny Lopez and his wife, Chita, the family of Sonny Alvarez, Raul Manglapus, and Jose Diokno, among others in the Ninoy Aquino Movement International that we had represented in Europe. There were also the most active Fil-Americans in San Francisco, the family of Dr. Mallari among them.

After EDSA, the friendships that formed the Opposition were broken and were no longer what they had been when we were struggling. Except for an inner circle close to the Aquinos and Lopezes, I only heard heart-wrenching stories of disillusion from those who had worked hardest and heard complaints that it was not possible to even get near Cory’s Malacañang with its thick cordon sanitaire. Some of them were cronies of the previous administration now in league with the top guns of Filipino oppositionists associated with Marcos’ erstwhile political partners. A name was reserved for them and remains true up to today. How could politicizing workers in Europe that we worked with during our exile matter to the elite that were empowered with what was euphemistically called the People Power Revolution? The political work that mattered was done in Washington and getting America’s powerful elite in government to switch its support from the Marcoses to the Lopezes…

It was to be expected, but still, some of us raised our hopes that the well-born wife of Ninoy Aquino would rise above her class. It turned out she was apolitical and more concerned with the advancement of the fortunes of her family. Like my friends in the Opposition, I was deluded into believing that the rhetoric of revolutionary fervor would be the guiding light of the new government of which his widow was now the head.

Meanwhile, I had to turn to personal matters in the aftermath of the “revolution.” I had to pick up the broken pieces of my life and meld it with the persona I had become after 20 years of exile and the events that led me to write the “Untold Story of Imelda Marcos.”

I began to understand what destiny meant. It was almost as if I was led to it by circumstances thrown my path. As Tolstoy said, we are free on our own individual actions and able to make choices but we are not free in deciding the big picture and all the events that we recognize only in hindsight when the pieces of puzzle had been put together as a whole.

Frankly, I was not fully aware of what it would lead to when I decided I would write the book, whatever the odds. Writing it changed my life forever, and with it also my husband and children’s lives. It was as if I was led into it and there was no escaping it when the deed was done.

We returned to Manila from exile in 1987, a year after the People Power Revolution. 

I was once again in opposition this time to the Aquino heir, President Benigno Aquino III. How else could I be? It was reported that the Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura that the Aquinos have reclaimed ownership of the 6,453-hectare Hacienda Luisita. The farmer-beneficiaries who were supposed to own the land under the agrarian reform program were back as sakadas or plantation workers.