Rewriting a revolution

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40 years ago, a million people faced down tanks and helicopter gunships on a highway in the

Philippines. It was the final act of an uprising that ended the two-decade long reign of

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. This was serious things, but you can't get scared in the middle of

a million people anymore. It was like, okay, here we are. Let's get on with this thing.

Suddenly, all of the tanks crumbled into action.

They were so camouflaged, I didn't see. There were hundreds of proofs lying on the ground.

And then when they stood up, oh my god.

This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Sheila Coronel,

an investigative journalist from Columbia University, New York,

and this is rewriting a revolution.

I ask you to let your voices be heard.

Koreakino led the opposition to Marcos.

I ask you to let the people's power be filled.

I ask you to send this message to the Pharaoh in language unmistakable and clear.

Let our people go. Let the Philippine people go.

Marian Rosas is a curator. She joined a crowd along Manila Central Artereo,

Epifanio de Los Santos Avenue, or Edsa.

It is really sweat, besides sweat.

It is really bodies touching.

I don't think you have an experience like that anymore.

If it didn't happen the way it did, then we'll be dead.

That is serious. It wasn't playtime.

People linked arms, played a rosary, offered flowers to the troops,

and the soldiers refused to fire.

It was a religious experience.

It's our religious experience.

Eventually people came with their own statues of saints,

and icons served to show female energy, because it's mostly virgin Mary.

And when it comes to dire situations,

it's the female energy actually in the old Austronesian world that becomes a fighter.

The old culture is still there. This is not Christianity.

Inside the palace, Mr. Marcos is still clinging to power.

I warn the opposition do not compel me to move into extremes

that you already know all. If necessary, I will do so.

Americans have publicly called on him to step down and avoid bloodshed.

Mr. Marcos insists he will be inaugurated president as scheduled in the morning,

but supporters of the opposition leader Koria Kino say she'll be made president before then.

Mr. Marcos has hard to left his palace since the phony elections

destroyed his government's credibility over two weeks ago.

And at the president's front gate, this is a Kino supporters push their luck to the limit.

The troops and orders to open fire and defence of government property.

But the mob was determined to remove the barbois barricades.

But it was all too much for Mr. Marcos's palace guard.

They fired into the air to frighten off the ground.

In 1986, I was a young reporter covering the four-day uprising.

They called it the People Power Revolution.

I was there when the barcos was fled and the crowds surged to the presidential palace.

I was swept along, entering the family's most private spaces.

Emelted as closet with a soon-to-be-famous thousand-plus pairs of shoes,

the bedroom with the ailing Ferdinand's dialysis machine,

the ornate Baudoir with gallon-sized bottles of perfume.

Through the gates without resistance,

into a palace which they regard as the equivalent of Hitler's bunker,

within minutes, a Kino supporters began throwing state papers from the palace's windows.

Many who heard the news of the Marcos's departure wept and knelt down to prey.

There was dancing in the streets, fireworks, horn honking and laughing, crying and bracing.

The long agony is over.

We are finally free and we can be truly proud of the unprecedented way we achieved our freedom.

People power stunned the world.

Marcos was America's boy, a ball-walk against communism in Asia,

a defender of the free world, even if his own country wasn't free.

Growing up in Manila, I had no memory of any other president but Marcos.

I started elementary school when he was first elected president.

He and Emelda were like royalty.

I thought they would rule for life.

But in 1986, we were sure this is it.

Finally, the end of the Marcos era.

So Mrs. Akino is now the ruler of this country.

We now had a free press, a new constitution, guardrails in the presidency.

Across our seven and a half thousand islands, local governments were given more power.

What this country is looking forward to, I think, is something which offers them reform

clean government and perhaps a return to normal civil rights.

Yet, four decades later, there's little rejoicing about the freedoms we want.

Democracy didn't deliver food to the hungry, nor jobs to the millions out of work.

Drive around Manila and you'll see the new enclave of wealth.

They're like mini-dubbs, islands of affluence in the sea of poverty.

The uprising, many Filipinos now say, was just rich people's power.

Our leaders lived off the public trough, impervious to the people's misery

and the precarity of their lives.

This is Tondo in Manila, overcrowded and squalid.

Its residents stuck in a social and economic twilight zone abandoned by the state.

The feeling of abandonment never really left a swath of Filipino voters.

And 30 years on from people power, a strong man-style leadership returned to the presidential palace.

In 2016, Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand who promised to kill, to keep them safe.

And then, six years after that, they voted for the deposed dictator's son,

Ferdinand Bong-Bong Marcus Jr., just what the revolution was designed to prevent.

That was in 2022, exactly 50 years after his father declared martial law.

You might say history is repeating itself.

Ferdinand Marcus Jr., universally known as Bong-Bong, won the presidential election.

He's the son of the former dictator who ruled for more than 20 years

during which time opposition was crushed and thousands of people were jailed or disappeared.

How could this happen in a country that gave the world people power?

Those who took part in the uprising now ask, was it worth it?

How did Asia's first republic, America's showcase of democracy in the Pacific end up this way?

The fundamental expectation of a Philippine president is to maintain order.

Manuel Cazón III is a presidential historian and columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

He's also the grandson of the Philippine's second president, from whom he takes his name.

If you trace the popularity or lack of it of any president since the 1980s, it has been on that

fundamental question.

What we needed in the Philippines was something like a enlightened dictatorship.

In 1965, Ferdinand Marcus was elected president for the first time.

He was voted on the promise that he would fight corruption and restore law and order.

Marcus had fought his way to the top.

A lawyer and self-described World War II hero, he was first elected to represent

the rural province of Ilocos, Norte.

The Manila elite looked down on him as a provincial wannabe,

but he spoke to the frustrations of men like my father.

My father too was a lawyer from a nowhere town in the Ilocos region.

They were people who were made members of a rising middle class,

so imbued with the upwardly mobile aspirations of a middle class and the frustrations of a class

held back simply because they lacked the pedigree.

And that therefore, Marcus, I think, by his own life experience, was able to communicate to his

generation that I understand you.

An uncle of mine who was his contemporary told me the perfect story.

This was in 1949, Marcus is about to enter politics.

He's invited to a swimming party of his generation of up and coming leaders,

and they're all there in their swimming trunks and he shows up in a white shark skin suit

with patent leather white shoes and everyone laughed him out of the room.

The punchline my uncle said is that nine out of ten of the people in that gathering ended up

in exile or jail.

The Philippines was America's first democracy building project, long before Iraq or Afghanistan.

US troops invaded my country in 1898.

They fought a brutal war against Filipino rebels demanding independence from more than 300

years of Spanish rule. What followed was a half century of American tutelage

designed to remake the Philippines in America's image.

Marcus belonged to the last generation of young professionals who reached maturity

under the American period.

They did so right on the eve of the Japanese occupation.

So you could say that Marcus belonged to that sort of chameleon generation of Filipinos

who had it down path when it came to verbalizing everything that the Americans wanted to hear,

but to understood that the reality on the ground is far different from what the official platitudes are.

Marcus was cunning. He understood that in a country that had been a US colony,

whose people had been labeled little brown brothers by American officials.

Any leader had to speak the language of their big brother.

He was a member of a particular subset of Philippine society that had a lot of

resentments against the pre-war and post-war status quo. He knew what everyone's price was.

I think that is what set him apart from all his contemporaries.

By the time Marcus won a second presidential term in 1969, the country was in crisis.

He had raided the Treasury to fund his campaign. There was massive boat buying and rampant fraud,

the poor in the countryside were arrested, and in Manila, students were storming the presidential palace.

It was then that young radicals teamed up with the remnants of a 1950s communist peasant rebellion

and formed the new people's army. In August 1971, two grenades exploded on the stage

where the opposition was holding a political rally. Nine were killed, nearly 100 wounded,

including several senators. The middle class feared chaos. Many creed order.

My father kept the shotgun near his bed and he joined neighbors in nighttime patrols in our suburban

village. Marcus declared an emergency and laid the groundwork for martial law, which he imposed a year

later. We had our back to the wall as it were. More than this was the atmosphere of despair here in

Manila and the surrounding areas because of the continuous bombing and violence.

Manila, the Philippine capital, has always been known for its enjoyable nightlife.

But whether these swingers are enjoying themselves or not, they won't be allowed to leave for

another three hours when the curfew is lifted at 4 a.m. These stay in nightclubs, as they're called,

are a curious result of that night in 1972 when martial law was swiftly and efficiently imposed.

On that day, the elected congress was suspended. Its members were locked out of the

legislative chamber except for a few who were locked up, like Senator Aquino who's still in jail.

Television and radio stations were taken off the air and newspapers closed down.

The old society of violence, corruption and pork barrel politics said President Marcus was dead,

in its place a new society would arrive. A society built on discipline, but

cleninous and order and honesty would prevail.

Martial law arrived in silence. There were no newspapers that day, nothing on TV except the

martial law announcement. I remember the midnight curfew. The barbed wire barricades, the hushed

streets. Activists disappeared in the night. 50,000 were arrested in the first three years.

Reports by Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists confirmed the horrors

attested to by those who survived them. So I was captured and then I was tortured and interrogated

for about three or four weeks, then incarcerated in the detention center for more than a year.

We were overcrowded. We had a single cell, good only for about 10 people,

about 30 of us there.

Amadram and Doza is a retired professor of political science and international studies at the

University of the Philippines. During the martial law years, he was in the underground resistance

to the dictatorship. One of the things that they do was really to torture you psychologically.

The less sophisticated ones resorted to physical pain. They have this method of

using families' eyes through the battles and they would just continue tapping into it. Before you

know it, it's back in the air. When they failed to achieve their objectives, when they will use

our instincts to beat you up. Not many of us knew then that torture and disappearances

ensured the regime's survival. We were distracted by the celebrities first lady Emelda

Marcos brought to the country. Margot Fontaine, Muhammad Ali, broke shields amongst many many

others. Emelda staged spectacles that sought to rival even that put on by real royals.

She was wanting to be Faradiba. So whatever she saw, in the international band of brothers

of dictators, she would try to get her own version. At this time, Marri and Rosas was working

as a curator at Emelda's Cultural Center of the Philippines. Adjoining it was the Folkart's

Theatre, built in 1974 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant, a grand parade, 20,000 people

inaugurated the building, inspired by a similar spectacle mounted by Faradiba Palavi, the last

Empress of Iran. And so the structure of the spectacle was evolution from ancient history

to the glorious days of modernity embodied by the Shah of Iran in the case of Iran.

In the Philippines, the new society of Ferdinand Marcos was the high point of evolution. And we

really mustn't forget that this was global, this wonderful women and this macho dictators,

they were friends. Emelda was the other half of what a former Marcos propaganda is called,

the conjugal dictatorship. Emelda Marcos was appointed governor of Manila and minister of human

settlements with millions of dollars of foreign aid at her disposal. She developed a notoriously

extravagant lifestyle and she and other members of the regime amassed huge personal fortunes.

As the Philippines stopped anti-graphed court found, Marcos and his cronies stole money from

Japanese war reparations. When that ended and turned into foreign development assistance,

the bribery simply continued, prompting Japan to change its age rules years later.

Philippine government auditors also found that Marcos siphoned off US military aid.

The couple mired the Philippines in death with the help of the World Bank and the IMF.

They're inablers banned the globe, American lawyers, Manhattan railtards, Swiss bankers,

and Japanese executives who helped them loot the country and hide their wealth over the course of

their 21-year rule. When the revolutionary government started tracing their loot,

the Marcos were estimated to have amassed up to 10 billion in 1980s US dollars.

That's around 28 billion today.

I'm Ruben Karanza. I am a senior expert at a non-government organization called the International

Center for Transitional Justice, ICTJ, which deals with corrupt dictators, war criminals,

and corrupt war criminals, or also dictators.

Ruben took me on a tour of a mildest New York.

During the martial law years, she lived the life of a Manhattan socialite.

The first lady shopped the Tiffany's, partied at Studio 54, and hung out with the likes of

the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Once martial law ended, Emelda had the keys to several

skyscrapers, like Forty Wall Street, where our tours started.

So four buildings were gifted from 1981 to 1982 by Ferdinand to Emelda Marcos. This was one of them,

acquired for about 70 million dollars in December 1982, and of course titled in the name of a

Caribbean holding company, which is one shareholder, the 70 million came from different sources,

both Philippine money, as well as money that came from other borrowings by the Marcoses,

but ultimately secured with assets acquired with Philippine money.

One other way that they obtained capital to buy these buildings was to literally withdraw money

from the branch of the Philippine National Bank here in New York.

According to one testimony before the US House of Representatives,

she wanted to pull the same 70 million-it-cost to get it later from this building and by something

else. So it was an investment for her as well these buildings.

Under aliases, Ferdinand and Emelda became regular customers of some of the world's largest banks.

And they were knowingly accepted Marcos money in Switzerland and then used that as a security

for the Marcos-created holding companies created in Panama, in the Caribbean, in offshore accounts.

And so these banks knowingly participated in the process of lending to this dummy corporation so

that they could acquire real estate here and allowed that to keep going for decades knowing

what was going on with the Marcoses. While Emelda was shopping and partying,

Filipinas were going hungry. In 1982 or 1981, for example, the sugar industry had collapsed.

There was malnutrition in the central Philippines. Children were dying because sugarcane farmer

families could not feed them. So the Philippine debt in 1982 was approximately 26 billion dollars.

Can you imagine your country owes 26 billion dollars to foreign creditors but you decide to buy

a 70 million dollar building that same year.

You're listening to the documentary and this is rewriting a revolution from the BBC World Service.

This is not the future we were promised. Like hell that out for a tagline for the show.

From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your

world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is

actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people

using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. This is rewriting a revolution

and I'm Sheila Coronel, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York.

US President Reagan's support only emboldened the Marxists.

Washington believed only Marx could assure continued access to US bases in the Philippines,

which were among the largest US military installations in the world.

In 1981, Marx lifted martial law to appease the opposition and the liberals in the US government.

But he continued to have decree-making powers.

Presidential historian and journalist Manuel Casen III.

By the time he had his third inaugural in 1981, he was completely unchallenged and everyone had

been whipped. Then came the great miscalculation.

He won another term, but what remained of his government's credibility was crippled in 1983,

when Benigno Aquino, the opposition leader, was assassinated within minutes of his return from

exile in the United States. Marcos associates were widely held to be responsible.

The murder brought together most of the previously disparate forces opposed to the regime.

Two million march in Aquino's funeral. I was there, standing shoulder to shoulder with the

multitudes. There were no police to be seen along the route as the crowds, many carrying anti-government

banners and chanting songs of freedom followed the coffin.

Despite official denials, many believe the government of President Marcos was behind the killing

at Manila Airport.

Filipinos were ready for change. Marcos had undergone two kidney transplants. He was losing control.

The communists were gaining strength. The middle class that one supported Marcos now wanted him out.

Under pressure from the US, Marcos called a snap election on the 7th of February 1986.

He cheated brazenly in full view of TV cameras and 44 election observers from 16 countries.

Back in Manila, something had to give.

So on the 23rd of February, military rebels led by the Defence Minister and a top army general

plotted a coup but were discovered. Fearful for their lives, they gathered in the military camp

and asked for help.

Protesters came, many with rose rebbeads and religious icons in their hands.

And immediately I called my radio station and since everybody was listening to radio veritas,

I became a field marshal.

Cardinal Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, responded by making a plea on veritas, the Catholic

radio station. The priests and the nuns were able to stop violence. They were there not because

they're interested in politics but they were interested in saving the lives of people.

In the next three days, a million Filipinos filled the now famous highway called Edsa.

Marcos and his family were holed up in their palace, abandoned except by a few loyalists.

The decisive moment, a phone call yesterday from Marcos to send it a poor laxalt,

a close Reagan friend who advised him to leave.

And there was the longest pause on the other end of that phone.

Seemed last minutes and he finally said, Mr. President, are you still there?

And finally he came on and he says, yes, I'm here, Senator.

He says I'm so very, very disappointed.

The next day, two US military helicopters airlifted the dictator and his family

from the presidential palace to an American airbase in the Philippines.

From there, they were flown into exile in Honolulu.

People power was the force that swept her in and upon which her independence from the military

largely depends. As post-Victory Euphoria ebbs away and the country's endemic problems

loom once again, President Aquino's first objective must be to tackle the economy.

The country's coffers were empty. Some urged Aquino to repudate the crushing foreign debt,

but she refused. She wanted the country to be in the good graces of the World Bank and the IMF.

Instead, she created the Presidential Commission on Good Government or PCGG

to reclaim the Marcos' stolen wealth.

The effort took decades, unfinished, even today.

Ruben Karanza worked there as a commissioner.

It's unique because it's the only agency that is specifically mandated to go after one family

and their cronies. It's in the law. And I think it's one of the contributions of the Philippines

to accountability that you could just actually create a commission to go after a former corrupt dictator.

You don't resort to normal means of accountability.

In exile, the Marcos has used their wealth to destabilize the Aquino government.

In one instance, Ferdinand Marcos himself was caught on tape,

discussing the purchase of tanks and missiles for his military supporters.

Then, in 1989, Ferdinand Marcos, the ruler of the Philippines for 20 years,

has died in Honolulu. He lived in exile in Hawaii, and only his ill health saved him from

standing trial on charges of embezzling vast sums of money.

A year later, Imelda was acquitted on racketeering charges in a New York court,

which involved purchases of art, jewelry, and malhattan properties.

My father was Imelda Marcos's lawyer. He had been a long time Marcos supporter,

one of many who had thrived in the old regime and continued to be loyal to the family.

Association with the Marcos has used to be a matter of pride, but no longer.

Loyalty has shifted, friendships dissolved, families fractured, mine included.

Family gatherings became increasingly strained.

I was thrilled that my father was shortening between New York and Manila,

laying the groundwork for Imelda's homecoming and making sure she wouldn't be arrested upon her return.

The new government didn't want Imelda back, but they also wanted to recover the hundreds

of millions of dollars the Marcos has had squirreled away in Swiss banks.

In 1986, the Swiss government had ordered a freeze on the Marcos assets.

It was a historic decision.

They previously had refused to freeze the assets of the deposed Shah of Iran.

In 1990, the Swiss courts handed over documents related to the Marcos' secret accounts,

but they would only give back the funds if Filipino courts could establish

these were criminally acquired.

And to do that, the Philippines needed a defendant, in person, in the Philippine court.

Historian and journalist Manuel Quezon.

Human rights helped make their comeback possible, because it was a condition

of the Swiss government that meant that the Marcos' could come back to the Philippines to face

their charges according to the demands of the Swiss government.

And on November 4, 1991, almost six years after Filipina said never again to the Marcos'

they were back, in style, in a charter jet and a 200 person entourage.

To a tumultuous reception, Mrs. Marcos stepped onto the tarmac at Manila Airport

after dabbing a little champagne behind her ears for good luck.

She returns to face 70 counts of tax evasion and corruption.

I am convicted not because I have stolen, because I have given, and I have loved.

What is my crime in this world? What have I done?

As soon as Imelda touched home soil, she laid the foundation for her family's restoration.

All of this comes to a head in 1992. That was our first post-edza presidential election.

It was a multi-party election, the first of its kind.

Imelda Marcos ran, Eduardo Dundinco Juanco, the principal lieutenant of Marcos ran,

but if they had run together or one had given way to the other, they would have gotten more

combined votes than any of the other candidates representing the anti-Marcos coalition.

It shows you that as early as 1992, their constituency was strong.

Now, it's one that should naturally have aged itself into extinction.

So what happened?

The Marcos' were allowed to participate in the political process, and the first thing they

did, of course, was fortify what Imelda Marcos likes to call in her private moments the grand duchy

of Ilocos Norte.

Imelda Marcos is Imelda's daughter, and now sits as a Filipina senator.

Both she and her brother, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., have served as governors of Ilocos Norte,

a small northern province of the Philippines.

We tried repeatedly to organize an interview with Imelda,

but her team were unable to meet our requests over what they say were scheduling conflicts.

And of course, there was a well-thought-out, disciplined, multi-generational rehabilitation program.

It started with the establishment by Imi Marcos of the Marcos Presidential Center,

which was simply dedicated to collating all the works of Marcos and giving school copies of it.

One journalist showed me a thing where there's exercise books in which students learn to write

cursive, and the example sentences in these exercise books that were given to provincial schools

outside Metro Manila, so no one notices.

President Marcos was the greatest president the Philippines ever had.

No one has loved the Philippines more than Ferdinand Marcos.

Things like that. I was able to show with YouTube that two years before

Bong Bong Marcos ran for president, somehow spontaneously you start seeing videos of school bands

suddenly playing the anthem of the dictatorship from 1972. After years that no one had played it,

but all of a sudden videos all throughout the country, little children parading in townplaces

playing this song.

And then the first act of the Marcos Junior campaign is they release a heavy metal version of it

because a whole new generation had been primed to recognize the tune.

That anthem, Bhagong Pagcilang, or New Birth, served a sonic propaganda for Marcos' new society.

You can find multiple versions of it on YouTube featuring performances by high school bands

or remixes paired with nostalgic videos of the Marcos.

It's a reality many who participated in people power never could have imagined.

What happened in the years after people power was not just a restoration of the Marcoses.

It was the revival of a system that had allowed them to rise the power in the first place.

The post-war elite democracy patterned after that of the United States.

There was an negotiation literally on one hand between Marcos and Koryakino with the Americans

as the brokers, but also between all the different leaders who had to make their own bargains

because it was clear that one regime was no longer viable, but there needed to be elements

of the old regime to kickstart the new one. It was a turning back of the clock.

After a Kino's presidency ended in 1992,

factual fissures emerged as political families vied for power.

A military general, a movie star, and various political heirs of all persuasions rose to the top job.

By 2001, there was a second revolt which led to the ousting of the popular Joseph Estrada,

a movie star turned president. My colleagues and I had reported on him,

tracing the shell companies and nominees he had used to build multiple mansions for multiple mistresses.

Our reporting was cited in the impeachment charges, along with a testimony of a whistleblower

who said he had delivered to the president brief cases of cash from illegal gambling lords.

When the impeachment proceedings broke down,

Koreakino and the Catholic Church once again summoned people power.

The crowds returned to Edsa, the site of the original anti-Marcus uprising.

Most limited class, angry and relentless, they demanded Estrada's resignation.

The old president has already vanished from power and the new one hasn't even had time to move

into her presidential palace. The empty building behind me should serve as a sobering warning

to other embattled Asian leaders. Months later, the poor who loved and supported him marched on Edsa.

Police quelled the uprising, but the division was clear. Two revolts in barely five months.

The first removed the populist Estrada. The second wanted him back.

The last revolt marked the end of our illusions about people power.

The poor saw that people power was only for the rich and middle class.

It was a fiction to legitimize elite rule. The affluent on the other hand realized people power

could be wielded against them too. For the disillusioned migration provided an escape route.

The old middle class frustrated by the inability to reform things emigrate from the 1990s onwards.

These are people who were the backbone of the anti-Marcus movement in the 70s and 80s.

They're on a broad and their children have gone abroad. The church club in school,

all the old associations are more active outside the Philippines and they are in the Philippines now

because they're no longer relevant here. When Rodrigo de Terte came along,

I said that's where his constituency comes on. These are people who respect none of the old norms,

which they view no longer as means to make them enhance dignity or give liberty, but as the opposite.

Yes, there is a new middle class. It is one profoundly contemptuous and cynical of

everything that has happened since 1986 because since 1986, there has been no ability to

accomplish any significant change. And then one thing changed everything, the internet.

So they were able to transition the attrition of the old loyalists by creating a new generation,

not dependent on the old loyalists, but simply on the placement of textbooks,

insertion of videos on YouTube. And again, in places where you knew the young people were going,

but those actually in power are too old to recognize is the new battlefield until it's too late.

A country where 90% of the population is online is fertile ground for fogging historical memory

and priming the ground for autocratic resurgence. Like the election of Rodrigo de Terte in 2016,

whose populism appealed to the masses craving change, he promised voters that fish in Manila Bay would

grow fat feeding on the corpses of criminals. He was a candidate who spoke to many Filipinos

affectionate democracy. He promised discipline. Millions listened.

The former president of the Philippines Rodrigo de Terte will be arriving in the hay in the Netherlands

where he will face charges related to killings during his war on drugs. That follows the

issuing of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court. Mr. de Terte led a brutal

crackdown on drug dealers and users during his time as mayor of the city of Davao and then as

president. It's thought as many as 30,000 people were killed during this time with human rights groups

accusing the police of indiscriminate violence. It's rare for a Filipino president to face accountability,

but he remains popular. Sarah, his daughter and political heir is currently vice president.

In many respects, she's like her father. She's now the top contender to succeed.

And today, rather than take to the streets, a vast majority of Filipinos

voice their displeasure with the politics of the day online. These networks that are taking

over online are only amplifying already existing anxieties that people already have.

Nicole Curato is a professor of democratic governance at the University of Birmingham in the UK

and specializes in how democracy works in fragile and conflict-affected environments in the

Philippines. She was a toddler when people power swept through the country.

What we've seen especially in the context of the Philippines in the rise of the strongman

president Rodrigo Duterte to power, we've seen how these platforms can actually be gained,

how they can be controlled by influence operations that amplify particular kinds of information

that can persuade voters to act a certain way. To fight his war on drugs, Duterte crung top the

death squads and surveillance networks that remained from the Marcos police state. He and his

daughter Sarah also supported the presidential campaign of Ferdinand Wong Wong Marcus Jr.

In doing so, they helped complete the Marcos restoration.

What's particularly interesting about Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is it's not old school type

populist demagoguery. So it's main theme is unity. What it actually takes advantage of is

this very popular digital culture of toxic positivity, right? But it's all about good vibes.

And so when people accuse the Marcos of changing history, of historical revisionism,

of not talking about the human rights abuses and the corruption during martial law,

what we observe is it's not just this information, but what they actually do is to distract people

and just say, no, no, but we have to move on. We need to look forward. We need to heal.

And that was such a resonant theme, especially coming from the Duterte era, which was so polarizing.

It was so dark. So I think that was the genius of the Marcos campaign. It really spotted the

political mood quite cleverly. A full accounting of the abuses of the Marcos dictatorship

has yet to be made, not to mention the legacy of state violence it left behind.

In my generation, and actually generations younger than me, our experience of violence is the drug war,

is Duterte's drug war, which was supported by many Filipinos. So in that sense, again,

this is the contrasting story of the Philippines, right? On one hand, we pride ourselves

as coming from a country that changed leaders peacefully without a single shot fired.

But on the other hand, we are also the country that elected, supported, and continued to love

a president who basically said he will kill all addicts. There's a contradiction there

in terms of how we appreciate violence in our country. That is still unresolved.

Last March, I watched from my home in New York, video footage of Duterte's arrest in Manila.

I couldn't believe it. Since 1965, when Marcos first took power, no one had been charged

with gross human rights violations, much less convicted or spent time in jail for any gross

human rights violations since 1965. So how many years has that been 35 plus 25?

Chacresanto is executive director of the Human Rights violations Victims Memorial Commission.

A government-funded body designed to better understand and commemorate the abuses of autocracy

in Philippine history. And that creates a culture of impunity that you can get away literally with

murder with blunder, except last March 11, 2025, when the first person, first former president of

our country, was sent to the Hig. That's the first time that someone is now being held accountable

for gross human rights violations. What Ferdinand Marcos offered and what Duterte offered 40 years

were not new orders through fear, discipline, through violence. This was the old colonial promise

that the unruly could be tamed by a firm hand. Democracy in the Philippines was a colonial

imposition. The Americans decreed it as a condition for independence. Our elites used it to

perpetuate the rule. That's why our relationship to democracy is so messed up. It's always been

something we both disdained and desired. It was really a very unfortunate thing because we tried

to adapt here in the Philippines, the American democracy, which didn't work at all because we

have the very reach and the very poor and very little in between. Carlos P. Romulo, a former

foreign minister under Marcos, speaking to the BBC in 1974. More than a decade later, I was

willing to believe in the democracy project. But since then, a revolution designed to usher in

political and social transformation has been eclipsed by the same old problems our country has been

mired in for too long, dynastic and oligarchic power, corruption, injustice and impunity still prevail.

Yet despite all that, wherever we are, we cannot forget this.

1986 was a time of astonishment and possibility. We had a sense that history was being made

and that we had a hand in its making. On Edsa, I was moved by the courage and creativity of ordinary

people. I saw for myself the liberating potential of people power. I like to think that potential

is still there. Nicole Curator belongs to the first generation to grow up after people power

and now has a child of her own. I asked her what future she imagined for our country.

We can imagine a democracy that is more creative, that is more responsive, that is not necessarily

reliant on political elites, but one that is driven by more grassroots type

participation, because the main lesson that we should learn from post-1986 democracy in

the Philippines is that we cannot trust our political elites, so my idealistic interpretation of

the future is maybe Philippine democracy, hopefully by then, will be genuinely controlled by ordinary

people. Rewriting a revolution was presented by me, Sheila Coronel. The producer was Alan

and Sound Design was by Rowan Bishop. This has been a two degrees west production for the BBC World

Service. This is not the future we were promised. Black held that out for a tagline for the show.

From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your weak and

your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technologies

actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people

are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.