Causes
On a warm Thursday night in Davao City six weeks before People Power inaugurated her president, Corazon Aquino laid out before a huddled crowd how she would go about governing the Philippines if given a chance.
‘I will listen to you before I act', said Cory; ‘my government will be one of patient consultation and personal involvement.[656] ‘I believe that you know your problems best and that you have the capacity, with the supplemental aid of central government, to solve your own problems'.[657]
This was a radical belief at the time. Patron-client ties had long been the hallmark of Philippine politics. Scarcely consulted or involved by the Government, most Filipinos usually solved their problems by relying on patrons to negotiate with officials on their behalf.[658] This practice was so ingrained that even in their prayers to God Filipinos appealed to Mary or a saint to intercede for them.[659] Why then did Cory believe otherwise?
‘Strong and self-reliant community organizations like the Basic Christian Communities are a hallmark of Mindanao today’, she explained, thanks to ‘the pioneering work especially of church workers --- priests, religious layworkers --- in their efforts to build strong and self-reliant communities’.[660] ‘My government’, she promised, ‘will encourage and support these organizations in order to strengthen local communities’.[661]
Cory was describing a revolutionary democratic practice at that time. Church workers and community organisers had a name for it: people power.[662] In the 1970s Catholic and Protestant bodies started raising group consciousness among the poor and organising Basic Christian Communities (BCCs). A BCC is a small community of neighbours or peers which are united in fellowship, cooperates with other communities, deliberates internal problems, and negotiates with other social sectors.[663] The main inspiration for it was Vatican II’s call for a ‘participatory Church’, but its roots extend to community organising by local ecclesiastics in the fifties.[664] Its purpose is to nudge the poor to participate in church and community decision-making so as to emancipate them from their traditional dependence on elites.[665] BCCs were ideally self-governing and egalitarian and empowered people to resist oppression.[666]
A bishop explained that ‘The ultimate basis of the power of people formed into BCCs is none else but their human dignity.’[667] This was crucial: dignity talk resonates with the poor.
Traditionally, Philippine peasants respect private property conditionally on their prior claims to daily needs, decency, and dignity being met.Political participation was not normally in this list of prior claims;[668] adding it as a fundamental aspect of human dignity galvanised many among the poor. It roused the poor from their acquiescence to an oppressive status quo through what the Church termed ‘conscientisation’: experiencing dignity, comprehending injustice, and striving for change.[669] BCCs empowered the erstwhile docile poor to demand political participation and resist elite domination.[670] By 1983 there were thousands of BCCs nationwide.[671]
1983 was a turning point in Philippine politics. Ninoy’s assassination that year swiftly eroded both US diplomatic and domestic popular support the dictatorship had enjoyed in its first decade.[672] Worsening economic conditions had already caused many to become disillusioned with Marcos.[673] The corruption and squandermania of Marcos’s relatives and cronies had made government woefully dysfunctional.[674] By 1985, only a handful trusted government institutions and only one in three still believed in elections. Only one in three, too, still believed in Marcos. What eight in ten citizens did believe was that their hardships would only get worse.[675]
With Marcos coopting patronage networks, Cory had to rely on people power for her presidential campaign.[676] Although her broad coalition included traditional elites, most were from the sectors which people power had galvanised and integrated into politics.[677] People Power was also a slogan of the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) campaign for the 1984 and 1986 elections.[678] Church leaders were crucial in mobilising the more than half a million NAMFREL volunteers for the 1986 presidential elections. In the archipelago’s peripheries, ‘the first and best person to contact was the local bishop.
Sometimes the bishop could more or less snap his fingers and a NAMFREL chapter would appear, already organized’.[679]Cory's speech on that warm Thursday night in Davao City was her way of donning the mantle of people power. The idea embraced much more than the ‘government of consultation' Cory promised then.[680] The following Thursday at the historic Manila Hotel she proposed nothing less than a democratic revolution.
‘I propose to dismantle the dictatorial edifice Mr. Marcos has built’, she said.[681] ‘In its place I propose to build for our people a genuine democracy'.[682]
Cory followed through on this campaign promise on her very first day as President by calling upon ‘all appointed public officials to submit their courtesy resignations beginning with the members of the Supreme Court'.[683] Five days later she lifted Marcos's nationwide suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.[684] A month after she repudiated the 1973 Constitution by abolishing the national legislature and promulgating the Freedom Constitution’ a provisional charter which proclaimed her mandate to include, among others, ‘the complete reorganization of the government” and “the restoration of democracy'.[685] Wielding all governmental power, Cory promptly appointed new Justices to the Supreme Court,[686] replaced ‘corrupt, inefficient and undeserving' government officials[687] (particularly pro-Marcos governors and mayors[688]), and ordered the repeal of the dictator's repressive decrees.[689]
All this was breathtaking. But was it legitimate? Cory claimed that her government ‘was installed through a direct exercise of the power of the Filipino people’ and thus was democratic.[690] The Philippine Supreme Court agreed with her, proclaiming in Lawyers League for a Better Philippines v Aquino that
the people have made the judgment; they have accepted the government of President Corazon C.
Aquino which is in effective control of the entire country so that it is not merely a de facto government but is in fact and law a de jure government.[691]Although Lawyers League was published after Cory had appointed new Justices, the Supreme Court took care to point out that its members were all Marcos appointees when it voted on the issue.[692] Nevertheless, democracy at a minimum means government selected in a free, fair, and open election, and Cory's government was not selected that way.[693] Although she confidently proclaimed that ‘The people and I have won and we know it’,[694] it was Marcos whom the National Assembly had proclaimed winner.[695] Cory herself acknowledged that her ‘new government was installed... in defiance of... the 1973 Constitution'.[696] As to the four days of peaceable revolution, it was attended by ‘merely a minority of a minority of the people of the Philippines', said a political scientist - less than a million of Metro Manila's 7.5 million residents and of the country's 56 million people.[697]
‘The military will never be able to determine, now or in the future, if our commander-in-chief' (namely Cory) had ‘won the election', Lieutenant Colonel Gringo Honasan, a charismatic coup plotter, told the press.[698] Many soldiers shared his sentiment. At that time only one in every three graduates of the Philippine Military Academy believed that Cory had won the 1986 elections; one in four believed Marcos had won.[699] For many soldiers only the four days at EDSA legitimated the revolutionary regime.
However, Cory was on another island when EDSA started, went into hiding after landing in Manila, and came out only after Marcos had fled.[700] The Revolution started with 300 soldiers publicly withdrawing their support from Marcos and the citizens who gathered along EDSA - though chanting ‘Co-ry! Co-ry! Co-ry!' - went there to protect the rebels against the Marcos military.[701] Cory herself acknowledged that those at EDSA were ‘assisted by units of the New Armed Forces of the Philippines'.[702] Naturally many soldiers felt, and their leaders demanded, that Cory give the military an equal share of power. Cory refused.[703]
Six months after Cory's inauguration, her Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile told a general ‘it's about time that we take back the authority we gave them'.[704] This was hot on the heels of a failed Manila Hotel coup attempt, whose leader urged
Cory to call an election as many were ‘restless’ for ‘the restoration of a constitutional government’.[705] These sorts of open attacks on Cory’s legitimacy ended only after the Constitution’s ratification.[706]
II.