I have decided to pursue my freedom struggle through the path of nonviolence. . . . I refuse to believe that it is necessary for a nation to build its foundation on the bones of its youth.
Benigno Aquino1
The most stunning nonviolent victory since those of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. occurred in the Philippines in early 1986. Praying nuns, nursing mothers, and old women in wheelchairs turned back bayonets and tanks. In four breathtaking days in late February, Filipino “people power” toppled President Ferdinand Marcos, one of the world’s most durable dictators.
Marcos and His Opponents
The story, of course, began much earlier. Marcos won the presidential election in 1965. In 1972, he declared martial law to “eliminate the threat of violent overthrow of the government.”2 This was not lifted until 1981. Even then, extralegal powers enabled him to continue his repressive rule.
Marcos used dictatorial powers to amass great wealth for himself, close friends, and cooperative foreign companies.3 His wife, Imelda Marcos, reportedly had three thousand pairs of shoes and “squandered $12 million on jewelry in a single day in Geneva.”4 To promote his development policy based on export crops, he ruthlessly suppressed workers who demanded decent wages and land reform. (Toward the end of his rule, the average wage for a sugarcane cutter working thirteen to fourteen hours a day was $7.00 a week.) Both Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists documented thousands of political prisoners in Marcos’s jails. Electric shock torture, water torture, extended solitary confinement, and beatings were common. Poorly trained soldiers led by corrupt officers terrorized civilians, “often looting or acting on behalf of local landowners and officials seeking revenge against rivals. They coined a euphemism, salvaging, to signify the arbitrary detention of villagers, many of whom disappeared after being held for interrogation.”5 Such measures propped up a system whereby a tiny portion of the population received a huge percentage of the nation’s total personal income.6
While Marcos and company stashed billions in Swiss banks, the majority of the people suffered grinding poverty. Three quarters of the people lived below the poverty line. Seventy-seven percent of all children under the age of six suffered from malnutrition.
Not surprisingly, a Marxist guerrilla movement gained increasing acceptance. A tiny group when Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the Marxist-led New People’s Army had grown into a strong national movement by the mid-1980s. Many prominent people felt that civil war was inevitable. It might take ten years of bloody battle, they guessed, but no other course seemed viable.
But the assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino, on August 21, 1982, ignited a fire that brought revolution by different methods.7 Aquino held the double honor of being Marcos’s most prominent political opponent and longest-held (1972–80) political prisoner. Reading Jesus and Gandhi in prison, this conventional, self-serving politician experienced a renewal of personal faith and a transforming commitment to the poor and nonviolence.8
Released in 1980 to obtain heart surgery in the United States, Aquino prepared himself for the right moment to return home to challenge Marcos’s repressive dictatorship. The nonviolent tactics that he intended to use were abundantly clear in a statement made to the subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the US House of Representatives on June 23, 1983:
To gather empirical data and firsthand information, I traveled to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and to Central America. I interviewed the leaders of the most “successful revolutions” and talked to both the victors and the vanquished, the relatives of the victims and the survivors. I have concluded that revolution and violence exact the highest price in terms of human values and human lives in the struggle for freedom. In the end there are really no victors, only victims. . . .
I have decided to pursue my freedom struggle through the path of nonviolence, fully cognizant that this may be the longer and more arduous road. . . .
I have chosen to return to the silence of my solitary confinement and from there to work for a peaceful solution to our problems rather than go back triumphant to the blare of trumpets and cymbals seeking to drown the wailing and sad lamentations of mothers whose sons and daughters have been sacrificed to the gods of violent revolution. Can the killers of today be the leaders of tomorrow? Must we destroy in order to build? I refuse to believe that it is necessary for a nation to build its foundation on the bones of its youth.9
But Aquino was not to return to his prison cell when he stepped off the plane at Manila International Airport on August 21, 1983. Instead, he dropped dead in a hail of bullets in an assassination almost certainly approved by President Marcos.
The Beginnings of Nonviolent Opposition
The country erupted in outrage. Spontaneously, a huge, nonviolent demonstration occurred. Day and night, millions moved past Aquino’s coffin in grief and silent defiance. Two million people marched peacefully in an eleven-hour funeral procession that persisted through sunshine and rain, thunder and lightning.10 They responded enthusiastically when Aquino’s mother and widow begged them to continue the struggle nonviolently. Two key symbols of the opposition to Marcos emerged: yellow, the color of the chrysanthemums that covered his casket, and the letter L “to signify Laban, the opposition political party.”11
This emotional outpouring did not immediately alter political reality. Marcos was still the dictator. The growing Marxist guerilla movement (NPA) increasingly appeared to many as the only alternative as Marcos continued to crack down on opponents.
To be sure, there were a few courageous voices promoting a nonviolent alternative. As early as the 1960s, some poor communities organized nonviolent struggles and won small but significant victories. Since the early 1970s, Francisco Claver, bishop on the desperately poor, guerrilla-infested island of Mindanao, had been promoting nonviolent liberation of the poor. Marcos’s army called him a Marxist. The Marxist guerrillas claimed that he supported the army. Bishop Claver quietly continued forming Christian communities committed to a nonviolent search for justice in his diocese. He also promoted the study of nonviolent social change among a small circle of Catholic bishops.12
Then, in February 1984, a short visit by two veteran nonviolent trainers crystallized more widespread interest in nonviolent alternatives. Hildegard and Jean Goss-Mayr had worked for decades promoting nonviolence in Europe and Latin America. Both Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil and the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina have traced their commitment to nonviolence to personal encounters with the Goss-Mayrs.13 As the couple traveled through the Philippines in February 1984, they concluded that the hour was late for any nonviolent efforts. But they also sensed a widespread yearning for some realistic alternative to the agony of civil war.
On the last day of their visit, Butz Aquino (brother of the assassinated Benigno Aquino) met privately with them. Aquino was an active leader in the ongoing protests against the dictatorship. Privately with the Goss-Mayrs, he confided his personal wrestling with the option of armed revolution:
A few days ago the arms merchants visited us and said to us, “Do you think that with a few demonstrations you will be able to overthrow this regime? Don’t you think you need better weapons than that? We offer them to you. Make up your mind.” . . . You see it is providential that you have come at this point of time, because ever since this visit I am unable to sleep. Do I have the right to throw our country into major civil war? What is my responsibility as a Christian politician in this situation? Is there really such a thing as nonviolent combat against an unjust system like that of Marcos?14
In response, the Goss-Mayrs challenged him to decide for himself. They warned that vigorous preparation for nonviolent resistance is essential: “Nonviolence is not something you do spontaneously and without preparation.”15 The couple volunteered to return to do seminars if invited.
The invitation came within weeks. In the summer of 1984, the Goss-Mayrs returned for six weeks of seminars on nonviolence. They held sessions for leaders among the political opposition (including Butz Aquino), labor unions, peasants, students, and the church. Bishop Claver organized a three-day seminar for twenty Catholic bishops. Everywhere, the Goss-Mayrs advocated a twofold approach to nonviolence: nonviolent opposition to the structural violence in Marcos’s economic and political system, and abandonment of the inner violence in one’s own heart.
The seed of the violence was in the structures, of course, and in the dictator. But wasn’t it also in ourselves? It’s very easy to say that Marcos is evil. But unless we each tear the dictator out of our own heart, nothing will change. Another group will come into power and will act similarly to those whom they replaced. So we discovered Marcos within ourselves.16
AKKAPKA, a new Philippine organization committed to nonviolence (formed in July 1984), emerged from these seminars. AKKAPKA is the acronym for Movement for Peace and Justice. It also means “I embrace you” in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines. Led by the Jesuit priest José Blanco, AKKAPKA held forty seminars on nonviolent social change in thirty provinces around the country in its first year.17
The numbers seriously interested in using nonviolent methods grew rapidly in late 1984 and 1985. Three weeks of seminars in Protestant circles by the American ethicist Richard Deats swelled their ranks. Even so, those involved were hardly ready for the surprise of November 3, 1985.
Marcos’s Announcement and AKKAPKA’s Initiatives
On that day, Marcos suddenly announced presidential elections for February 7, 1986. In the words of one analyst, “Marcos was sure he would be given a new mandate to continue in office, either by winning the elections or simply by having them rigged.”18 While the ideological left decided to boycott the elections, AKKAPKA quickly devoted all its energy toward trying to guarantee a fair election. They focused on three activities: encouraging the people to vote, preparing poll watchers, and organizing prayer tents.19
People intimidated by years of violent governmental repression needed to be encouraged to cast fear aside, reject government bribes, and vote according to their consciences. Regularly, in previous elections, armed thugs had intimidated voters and stolen ballots. So AKKAPKA joined other religious and civic organizations to help train half a million men and women, young and old, clergy and laity, to defend the ballot boxes nonviolently, even if attacked by armed soldiers or thugs.
AKKAPKA set up prayer tents in ten highly populated areas. One was located in the heart of Manila’s banking community. Day and night, from mid-January 1986 to the end of the crisis, people came to these tents to fast and pray. Hildegard Goss-Mayr, who saw the tents in operation in early 1986, has underlined their importance:
We cannot emphasize enough the deep spirituality that gave the people the strength to stand against the tanks later on. People prayed every day, for all those who suffered in the process of changing regimes, even for the military, even for Marcos. . . . It makes a great difference in a revolutionary process where people are highly emotional whether you promote hatred and revenge or help the people stand firmly for justice without becoming like the oppressor. You want to love your enemy, to liberate rather than destroy him.20
Almost immediately after Marcos announced the snap election, more and more people began to call on Cory Aquino, widow of the assassinated Benigno, to challenge Marcos at the polls. Unwilling at first, she reluctantly agreed, announcing her candidacy on December 5, 1985, just two months before the election. In the short, intense campaign that followed, she discovered massive popular support. Clearly, she was on her way to a decisive electoral victory.
Marcos, however, used vast, unparalleled fraud to steal the election. According to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, there was widespread buying of votes, intimidation of voters, fraudulent tabulation of returns, harassment, terrorism, and murder.21 In metropolitan Manila alone, six hundred thousand people could not vote because Marcos’s agents had scrambled the voting lists.
Tens of thousands of nonviolent poll watchers with the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) courageously placed their bodies in the midst of all this corruption and violence. (NAMFREL had emerged as an independent organization in the 1984 parliamentary elections to conduct a quick, independent vote count and prevent some of the worst dishonesty.) Strong international support strengthened their hand in the 1986 presidential elections. NAMFREL deployed its thirty thousand volunteers at the most critical polling stations. Six hundred nuns, nicknamed the NAMFREL Marines, went to the most problematic locations. During the day of voting and the subsequent vote count, these nonviolent volunteers risked death many times. Twenty-four hours a day, they formed human chains and literally tied themselves to ballot boxes so that the boxes could not be stolen.22
NAMFREL’s quick count showed Cory Aquino with a substantial lead. But the official tabulation placed Marcos ahead. On February 9, thirty young computer workers involved in the official vote count left their posts to protest the deliberate posting of dishonest returns.23 That daring act removed any credibility still enjoyed by the official returns. In spite of that, the parliament (Batasan) prepared to declare Marcos the winner.
The Bishops Speak Out
At this desperate moment, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines issued one of the more daring political pronouncements of modern times by an official church body. On February 13, the bishops denounced the elections as fraudulent. They declared that Marcos’s government could not command the people’s allegiance because it lacked all moral foundation, and they called on the faithful to resist this evil with peaceful nonviolence.
“We are not going to effect the change we seek by doing nothing, by sheer apathy,” the bishops insisted. In their pronouncement, read from pulpits all across the country, the bishops dared to propose nonviolent resistance:
Neither do we advocate a bloody, violent means of righting this wrong. If we did, we would be sanctioning the enormous sin of fratricidal strife. Killing to achieve justice is not within the purview of our Christian vision in our present context.
The way indicated to us now is the way of nonviolent struggle for justice.
This means active resistance of evil by peaceful means—in the manner of Christ. . . .
We therefore ask every loyal member of the Church, every community of the faithful, to form their judgment about the February 7 polls. And if in faith they see things as we the bishops do, we must come together and discern what appropriate actions to take that will be according to the mind of Christ. . . .
These last few days have given us shining examples of the nonviolent struggle for justice we advocate here. . . .
Now is the time to speak up. Now is the time to repair the wrong. . . . But we insist: Our acting must always be according to the Gospel of Christ, that is, in a peaceful, nonviolent way.24
Hildegard Goss-Mayr believes that this declaration by the bishops was the first occasion, at least in modern times, when a conference of Catholic bishops publicly called on the faithful to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to overthrow an unjust system.25 Cardinal Jaime Lachica Sin, the archbishop of Manila, called it “the strongest statement any group of bishops has produced anywhere since the days of Henry VIII [in the early sixteenth century].”26
Though a small minority in a majority Catholic country, a handful of Filipino evangelicals connected with the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC) led by Melba Maggay also joined the call for nonviolent resistance. On February 20, 1986, an evangelical radio ministry, Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC), began to broadcast programs about civil disobedience. Unfortunately, the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) called for Filipinos to “submit to authority” and support the official election results, which favored Marcos.27
As the bishops’ statement reverberated around the Philippines, Cory Aquino was meeting with three hundred fifty key advisers to plan a campaign of nonviolent resistance. The Goss-Mayrs joined Cory Aquino, Cardinal Sin, and others to devise scenarios and develop an extended, nonviolent campaign of marches and boycotts designed to overthrow Marcos. A crowd of one million cheering supporters wildly applauded as Cory Aquino launched her campaign of civil disobedience on February 16. The tide had turned.28
Marcos, however, was determined to stay in power. He announced his intention to meet force with force. The struggle would be long and tough.
“People Power”
Surprise struck again on Saturday evening, February 22. Juan Ponce Enrile (Marcos’s minister of defense) and General Fidel Ramos unexpectedly rebelled. Denouncing the fraudulent elections in a news conference, they declared Cory Aquino the rightful president, and at 9:00 p.m., with only two hundred armed defenders, they barricaded themselves inside their camps in the middle of metropolitan Manila. The two hundred soldiers were at the mercy of Marcos’s army of two hundred fifty thousand. The president could destroy them at will.
At that moment, Butz Aquino and Cardinal Sin unleashed “people power.” Late on Sunday night, Butz Aquino called cause-oriented groups to fill the streets outside Enrile’s and Ramos’s camps. “We will surround the camps and protect them with our bodies,” he announced boldly.29
Cardinal Sin went on the radio Saturday evening and urged the people to surround the camps. “Go to Camp Aguinaldo and show your solidarity” with Ramos and Enrile, “our two good friends,” the cardinal pleaded.30 Within hours, thousands of men, women, and children ringed the gates of the camps, blocking any potential movement by Marcos’s army. Marcos would have to kill civilians if he chose to attack.
Before he went on the radio, Cardinal Sin called three orders of nuns, saying to each, “Right now get out from your cells and go to the chapel to pray. . . . And fast until I tell you to stop. We are in battle.”31 No troops attacked the rebels on Saturday night.
By Sunday morning, the streets around the camps were overflowing with people. Families came with children and picnic baskets. In spite of the danger, the mood was festive. Some groups even held worship services.32 All over the city, taxi and truck drivers spontaneously volunteered to shuttle people to the scene of action. Ramos and Enrile went on the air to beg for more civilians to flood the streets to act as a buffer between them and Marcos’s soldiers. They fully expected an attack. According to a professor at the Philippine Military Academy, it was this surge of “people power” that made the difference. “It was the first time in history,” Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Purificacion said, “that so many civilians went to protect the military.”33
The nonviolent soldiers of this “classless revolution” came from every walk of life.34 Wealthy bankers, top executives, and businesspeople drove their cars to the camps. The poor walked. Men and women, children and grandparents, priests and nuns, flooded the streets. Pregnant women and women with babies in their arms came ready to defy advancing tanks.
Sunday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. the tanks came. A large force of marines with tanks and armored personnel carriers headed for Enrile and Ramos’s little band of rebels. Rumbling through the streets, the huge machines stopped only a kilometer from Ramos’s headquarters, blocked by thousands of bodies ready to die rather than let them continue.
Amado L. Lacuesta Jr., one of the hundreds of thousands of civilians in the streets, offers a powerful eyewitness account of the people’s raw courage.35 As he squeezed his way through the densely packed street, he finally got close to where General Tadiar of the marines was negotiating with the civilians who surrounded his tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs). The sea of people were praying, some holding small statues of the Virgin Mary. General Tadiar demanded that the people let him through, but they refused. Just then, Butz Aquino arrived, clambered up on the APC, and explained how people power could avoid bloodshed.
As the soldiers pushed Aquino off the huge machine, its engines roared. Weeping and praying, the people expected to be crushed. At the very front were three nuns, kneeling in prayer an arm’s length from the throbbing motors. The metal mountain jerked forward once, twice, then stopped. The crowed cheered wildly. As a military helicopter made a low sweep, the people offered cigarettes to the soldiers, who looked away with a mixture of disdain and uncertainty. Again the engines roared, and the machine jerked forward. Men pushed against the advancing metal wall as the nuns continued to kneel in prayer. Row after row of densely packed bodies stood ready to be pulverized by tons of metal. But again the towering monster halted. This time, after more hesitation, the APC swiveled and retreated to the deafening roar of thousands of relieved, cheering voices.
Cardinal Sin tells the story of bedridden, eighty-one-year-old Mrs. Monzon, owner of Arellano University. Everywhere she went, she used a wheelchair. But Mrs. Monzon insisted on joining the people in the streets in front of the camps. When the tanks came, she wheeled in front of the advancing war vehicles. Armed with a crucifix, she called out to the soldiers, “Stop. I am an old woman. You can kill me, but you shouldn’t kill your fellow Filipinos.” Overcome, a soldier jumped off the tank and embraced the bold nonviolent resister. “I cannot kill you,” he told her, “you are just like my mother.” She stayed in the street all night in her wheelchair.36
The marines finally withdrew without firing a shot.
Monday brought more high drama. At dawn, three thousand marines succeeded in dispersing part of the crowd with tear gas. But seven helicopter gunships with sufficient firepower to obliterate both Enrile and Ramos’s rebel troops and the surrounding crowds landed peacefully and defected. At 9:00 a.m. Marcos appeared defiantly on television for a few minutes and then disappeared as rebel soldiers seized Channel 4 TV.
Romeo Lavella Jr., who lived near Channel 4, tells what he saw just after rebels seized the station.37 Hearing scattered gunshots, he rushed into the streets, where swarms of people stood between two groups of heavily armed soldiers. The pro-Marcos loyalists had more than twice as many men as the rebels who had just seized the station.
As sporadic gunfire erupted, a pickup truck carrying a priest praying loudly slowly inched forward. As the priest prayed the rosary and sang the Ave Maria, the people did the same. In the truck were statues of the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary. Awed, the soldiers stopped shooting. As another priest and civilians helped negotiate an agreement between the soldiers, the priest and people continued to pray and sing. Channel 4, meanwhile, stayed in the hands of the people.
Hundreds of thousands jammed the streets in front of the camps on Monday. From Cardinal Sin’s four auxiliary bishops to unknown slum dwellers, the people defied the guns and tanks.
Another striking encounter occurred in front of the Polymedic Hospital near the camps. Several trucks with gun-wielding soldiers and two APCs slipped past the crowd by displaying yellow streamers (Cory Aquino’s campaign color). A moment later, however, the crowd discovered their mistake, and people rushed to seal the street. Middle-aged women prayed loudly as helicopters hovered overhead. As the people stood their ground, the massive machines halted. Nobody would retreat. L. P. Flores’s eyewitness account of the soldiers’ reactions reveals the mystery of “people power”:
The people pressed their bodies against the armor. Their faces were pleading but they were clothed in nothing but raw courage. In that decisive and tense moment, the soldiers atop the armored carriers pointed their guns of every make at the crowd but their faces betrayed agony. And I knew then, as the crowd, too, must have discerned: the soldiers did not have the heart to pull the trigger on civilians armed only with their convictions. The pact had been sealed. There was tacit agreement: “we keep this street corner, you retreat.” And true enough, the armored carriers rolled back and applause echoed.
The face of that soldier struggling in agony for the decision to shoot or not, on the verge of tears, will forever remain in my memory.38
Dozens, indeed hundreds, of similar personal struggles ended with soldiers accepting flowers and embracing civilians. The battle was over. By Monday afternoon, a majority of the armed forces had abandoned Marcos. On Tuesday morning, Marcos stubbornly went through an inaugural ceremony, but his power had evaporated. Late that evening he fled. Cory Aquino was president.
Evaluating a Nonviolent Success
It would be naive, of course, to suppose that unarmed civilians in the streets singlehandedly overthrew Marcos. International pressure (including President Reagan’s belated decision to abandon Marcos) and the revolt of the army were clearly important. According to an editorial in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, however, it was massive nonviolent resistance that made the difference.
When the revolution now popularly called People Power began, it was triggered by two Filipinos—Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos. But neither of them would have survived if the people had not put themselves between the attackers and the leaders of the revolt.
People all over the world then saw the unbelievable.
Filipinos charging at giant tanks with Volkswagens. Nuns and priests meeting armored cars with Rosaries and prayers. Little children giving grim soldiers flowers and urging them not to fight for Marcos. People linking arms and blocking tanks, daring them to crush their fellow Filipinos, which they did not.39
Reading through the many eyewitness accounts in Monina Allarey Mercado’s People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986, one is amazed by the centrality of prayer and religious devotion. Sister Teresa was one of the Carmelite nuns ordered to fast and pray by Cardinal Sin. “We never forgot even for an instant that we were doing battle. We daily called God in prayer to assist us all: Those outside and we inside.”40 The radio accounts of the struggle in the streets, Sister Teresa reported, shaped their prayers.
Praying nuns and nonviolent resisters armed only with religious symbols had functioned as an effective deterrent:
People were willing to die but not to kill. And I thought that even if some soldiers were willing to shoot the people, they were not willing to shoot the crucifixes. Many of them come from the provinces where they were raised to fear God. They could never shoot at people who were praying. They could have shot people who were throwing stones, as they did during the rallies. But this was the first time that they were confronted with prayers. They did not know how to react. I think this was crucial to the whole nonviolence stance.
The people were there to defend the camp. They were not aggressors. We cannot pray and be violent at the same time. The religious character of the revolution made the revolution very unique. If you took away the religious flavor of the revolution, you would have removed the essence of it.41
Professor Randolf David, director of Third World Studies at the University of the Philippines, concluded in amazement, “I have been a student of revolutions, but this is the first time I have seen an assault led by the Virgin Mary.”42 Another observer stated simply, “Marcos had the guns, but Cory had the nuns!”43
Undoubtedly, the previous training in nonviolence had played a genuine role, although the convergence of the masses to protect the rebel soldiers was essentially a spontaneous emotional response rather than the result of careful organizing. Not surprisingly, nonviolent leaders such as Father Jose Blanco, the founder of AKKAPKA, believe that the Philippine revolution points the way for the rest of the world:
What does God wish us to proclaim to the world through our nonviolent revolution? Simply this: the political problems of people can be solved without recourse to arms or violence.
The world’s problems are best solved if we respect the humanity, the dignity of every human person concerned. The desire to be violent or to use violence can be tamed and diminished, if we show love, care, joy to those who are unjust and wish to be violent. Violence addresses the aggressor. Nonviolence searches out and addresses the humanity in the enemy or oppressor. When that common humanity is touched, then the other is helped to recognize the human person within and ceases to be inhuman, unjust, and violent.
One does not have to be a Christian to reach out to the humanity in the other.44
Such optimism needs tempering. One successful nonviolent revolution does not banish war. Nor dare one overlook the special circumstances that helped nonviolence succeed in this unique situation. Furthermore, simply overthrowing Marcos did not instantly create economic justice in the Philippines. Widespread poverty and injustice continued in the following decades, even as democratic processes took root and grew stronger, slowly promoting greater economic justice.
The People Power revolution of 1986 not only ousted a brutal dictator but also gave the world a new term. Worldwide, the term “people power” is now used to describe peaceful mass protest movements.45
The amazing fact about the People Power revolution of 1986 is that the Filipino people did depose a powerful dictator with virtually no bloodshed. Precisely in a context where many had concluded that the only viable path was years of bloody revolution, nonviolence produced a stunning victory. Nonviolent revolution works.
1. Quoted in Douglas J. Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 1986: Model of Nonviolent Change (Quezon City: New Day, 1986), 19. I thank David Fuller for help in researching this chapter.
2. Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 359.
3. For much of the following data, see Ricki Ross, “Land and Hunger: Philippines,” Bread for the World Background Paper, no. 55, July 1981.
4. Karnow, In Our Image, 373.
5. Ibid., 386.
6. According to Virginia Baron, “The Philippine Example,” Fellowship 53, no. 3 (1987): 4.
7. My sources for this chapter include the following: Monina Allarey Mercado, ed., People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986; An Eyewitness History (Manila: James B. Reuter, S.J., Foundation, 1986) (this magnificent book of eyewitness accounts and splendid pictures also contains short synopses of developments and valuable historical notes [pp. 308–14] on which I have relied for many of the historical details); several articles in the March 1987 issues of Fellowship 53, no. 3 (1987); Peggy Rosenthal, “Nonviolence in the Philippines: The Precarious Road,” Commonwealth, June 20, 1986, 364–67; Elwood, Philippine Revolution; Bel Magalit, “The Church and the Barricades,” Transformation 3, no. 2 (1986): 1–2; Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2000), chap. 10.
8. Hildegard Goss-Mayr, “When Prayer and Revolution Became People Power,” Fellowship 53, no. 3 (1987): 9.
9. Quoted in Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 19.
10. Mercado, People Power, 10, 304.
11. Karnow, In Our Image, 405.
12. Goss-Mayr, “Prayer and Revolution,” 8; Rosenthal, “Nonviolence in the Philippines,” 366. For earlier examples of nonviolence, see Esther Epp-Tiessen, “Militarization and Non-Violence in the Philippines,” The Ploughshares Monitor 7, no. 2 (1986), 3; Richard L. Schwenk, Onward, Christians! Protestants in the Philippine Revolution (Quezon City: New Day, 1986), 37.
13. Rosenthal, “Nonviolence in the Philippines,” 364.
14. Quoted in ibid., 365. See Hildegard Goss-Mayr’s account in “Prayer and Revolution,” 9.
15. Quoted in Rosenthal, “Nonviolence in the Philippines,” 365.
16. Goss-Mayr, “Prayer and Revolution,” 9.
17. Ibid., 10.
18. Joshua Paulson, “People Power against the Philippine Dictator—1986,” in Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005), 239.
19. Goss-Mayr, “Prayer and Revolution,” 10.
20. Ibid.
21. See the bishop’s official declaration, quoted in Mercado, People Power, 77.
22. Ibid., 43, 67, 68, 71.
23. Kurt Schock, Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 77.
24. Quoted in Mercado, People Power, 77–78.
25. Rosenthal, “Nonviolence in the Philippines,” 367.
26. Quoted in Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 5.
27. David S. Lim, “Consolidating Democracy: Filipino Evangelicals between People Power Events, 1986–2001,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia, ed. David H. Lumsdaine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 255.
28. Rosenthal, “Nonviolence in the Philippines,” 367; Mercado, People Power, 67.
29. Quoted in Mercado, People Power, 106.
30. Quoted in ibid., 105.
31. Quoted in ibid.
32. Lim, “Consolidating Democracy,” 256.
33. Quoted in Mercado, People Power, 120.
34. Ibid., 1, 109, 122; Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 14; Mark Thompson, Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2004), 22.
35. Cited in Mercado, People Power, 125–27.
36. Cited in ibid., 127.
37. Cited in ibid., 203–4.
38. Quoted in ibid., 207.
39. Editorial in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, February 27, 1986, quoted in Mercado, People Power, 246.
40. Quoted in ibid., 254.
41. Vincent T. Paterno, quoted in ibid., 257.
42. Melba Maggay, “People Power Revisited,” in Following Jesus: Journeys in Radical Discipleship; Essays in Honor of Ronald J. Sider, ed. Paul Alexander and Al Tizon (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2013), 128.
43. Quoted in Douglas J. Elwood, ed., Toward a Theology of People Power: Reflections on the Philippine February Phenomenon (Quezon City: New Day, 1988), 1.
44. From his epilogue in Mercado, People Power, 306. See Gene Sharp’s more cautious but similar comments in “Philippines Taught Us Lessons of Nonviolence,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1986 (articles.latimes.com/1986-04-04/local/me-24516_1_nonviolent-resistance). After the victory, AKKAPKA continued promoting nonviolent social change in the Philippines. See Richard Deats, “Fragile Democracy in the Philippines,” Fellowship, October-November 1987, 14–16.
45. Thompson, Democratic Revolutions, 18; see also Schock, Unarmed Insurrections, esp. chap. 3. In the Philippines “people power” occurred two more times. See Lim, “Consolidating Democracy,” 252.