People Power was not just on Edsa

By Antonio J. Montalvan II

I HAVE always maintained the writing style to never refer to the 1986 People Power upheaval as Edsa. I was in my twenties when I witnessed Cagayan de Oro’s version of those four incredibly momentous days of February 1986 (National Artist Nick Joaquin coined it more elegantly – the quartet of the tiger moon). I can swear that People Power was not geography-specific at Edsa.

The period of the Marcos dictatorship was Cagayan de Oro’s test of fire as the premier bulwark of political opposition in Mindanao. No other city in Mindanao can claim that singular credential. Davao city was backwaters then (as it still is today and always will be for reasons of history). It was here that the formidable triumvirate of Aquilino Pimentel Jr., Reuben Canoy, and Homobono Adaza was born. The Mindanao Alliance was one fearless voice that was not Manila-based yet was able to push the boundaries of the Marcos tyranny.

It is a fundamental predicate of history that even prior to February 1986, Cagayan de Oro had not only witnessed but also had in fact organized street protests against the Marcos dictatorship. When Nene Pimentel was incarcerated at Camp Sotero Cabahug in Cebu city, a massive show of defiance against Marcos walked the streets of Cagayan de Oro. There were no agitation propagandas. There were no loudspeakers. It was so eerily silent that one could actually hear the shuffling of a thousand feet on the hot asphalt pavement of Divisoria. There was only one message and it was to be left unsaid but palpably felt – defy Marcos. It was spine-tingling. This was a time when no mass protests escaped Marcos’s intolerance.

I recall seeing among the marchers Fr. William “Bill” Malley SJ in his white Jesuit belted soutana. The archbishop of Cagayan de Oro Patrick Cronin had earlier written a pastoral letter condemning the arrest and detention of the Cagayan de Oro mayor. Cronin, a naturalized Filipino citizen who had changed his name to Patricio, had chosen himself to be part of history and for which a grateful city remembers him by. Cronin had the uncanny ability to perfectly gauge the measure of what Cagay-anons can do. And so he had encouraged citizens to prop Nene in jail with signature Cagayan de Oro moral support. My mother, for one, responded with a telegram sent to the Cebu city military camp addressed to Nene: “Praying for your release.”

After Ninoy Aquino was assassinated, the first Mindanao city that his mother Aurora Aquino visited was Cagayan de Oro where she was mobbed as “the mother of all freedom-loving Filipinos.” Cory Aquino soon followed, even before she had campaigned for the snap election that later materialized as Marcos’s herculean faux pas. Invited by Nene to grace the inauguration of the old 1939 city hall building renamed as the Ninoy Aquino Hall of Justice, Cory was welcomed by a throng of Cagay-anons on the steps of that historic pre-war edifice. Cronin had made sure that his auxiliary bishop Christian Noel (later the first bishop of the newly created Diocese of Talibon in Bohol) was there to represent him.

Among those remembered by the national memory, as heroes for their fight against the Marcos dictatorship were the poet warrior Eman Lacaba who was actually born in Cagayan de Oro in 1948, and the international beauty queen Nelia Sancho. Eman was killed in 1976 in Davao del Norte. Nelia Sancho, crowned Queen of the Pacific 1971, was arrested in Cagayan de Oro while doing immersion in an urban poor community in 1976. Time Magazine once tagged her the “Guerilla Queen.”

Cagayan de Oro was more than ready then to join Manila those four days of cataclysm of February 1986. At the XU campus, the president Ernesto Javier SJ made sure there were endless screenings of the Marcos ill-gotten wealth at the audiovisual room. Students were taught history on the spot. Even before the Presidential Commission on Good Government was born during the ensuing Cory presidency, I had known of the palatial Lindenmere Estates that the Marcos conjugal dictatorship had bought in New Jersey for their royal fantasies at the expense of public money.

Back then, noise barrage was a norm – it didn’t need speeches, it only spoke defiance. At the XU campus, I distinctly recall the university president’s executive secretary, the erudite Lorenzo “Larry” Mariano picking up a tin garbage bin cover and made a noise out of it with all his might. The din, of course, did not reach Malacañang but it mentored the many that valor was all that was needed to multiply voices of opposition.

As People Power was in progress outside the gates of Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo, Cagayan de Oro buzzed with a noise barrage motorcade organized by Roy Hilario Raagas. The city was an opposition country (the mayor by then was Pablo Magtajas) and it was no coward to retreat from the fight against the Marcoses.

On the night the Marcoses fled to Clark airbase and then to Hawaii (“It’s all over, Marcos flees!” shouted the next day’s Philippine Daily Inquirer headline of February 26, 1986), there was dancing in the streets at Divisoria. The Tribuna (grotesquely renamed later as the ahistoric Kiosko sa Kagawasan), suddenly turned into a makeshift stage. Cagayan de Oro residents came out of their houses and shouted “Happy New Year!” I was on crutches that time from a minor surgery on my right foot. I was surprised with a bear hug by Tito and Linda Nable who had mistaken me for the rich man Casey Tamparong, barkada of their son Dino. When they realized the mistake, we all laughed together, saying it was a night of bear hugs anyway.

In the run-up to that night of people’s triumph of Feb. 25, one of the first Marcos-appointed officials to resign was the career envoy from Cagayan de Oro, Raul Roberto Ch. Rabe. Bobby at that time was consul general in Honolulu. That bravado was later rewarded when he was appointed post-Marcos as the Philippine ambassador to Washington DC, succeeding Emmanuel Pelaez.

Cagayan de Oro has a formidable tradition of freedom, not a pliant culture of silence and of sissies. Future oppressors must beware.

(Antonio J. Montalván II is a social anthropologist known for being vocal against corruption in government, human rights abuses, and matters involving indigenous peoples.)