A Bloodless Revolution: 1986 Philippines People Power
Sabrina Impreso and Chandler Griffin Senior Division Group Website
Process Paper There are numerous revolutions and conflicts throughout history that have changed and reformed countries around the world. While researching about the first woman president of the Philippines and the downfall of former president Ferdinand Marcos, we came across the EDSA Revolution, the bloodless revolution. We were intrigued in this significant part of the Philippine history that showed the massive peaceful protest of the Filipino people against the continued repression of President Marcos. As we kept researching about this topic, we learned that this conflict sparked the movement of non-violent protests against the government, ensuring us that this revolution truly fit the concept of the reaction, and reform in history. We conducted our research by reading and analyzing the history predating the revolution to truly understand the cause of the revolt. We first looked throughout several websites that showed a basic timeline from the inauguration of the Ferdinand Marcos to the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. This helped us gain a better view and grasp on this topic. As we continued researching, we were able to focus mainly on primary sources such as books and first hand interviews. The books allowed us to have a better understanding between the president and the people. The interviews that we were able to gather were from the general who participated in planning the Coup de tat (Revolution), the news reporter who accompanied Benigno Aquino on the plane, and the people who were present during the revolution. This enabled us to grasp the bigger picture of the cause of the revolution, how it was planned, what happened during and after it. We chose to present our project in a website format because we thought this would be the best way to portray out topic. We first read the NHD rules and guidelines.
We referred to the NHD Weebly website creator to familiarize ourselves with the tools. We included information, first hand interviews, pictures, media, and videos depicting the main events throughout the revolution. The EDSA Revolution or the People Power Revolution suits this years NHD theme because it was one of the first major non-violent and successful revolts against the dictatorship of the Ferdinand Marcos regime. The reaction in this Revolution started with the assassination of political candidate for presidency, Ninoy Aquino (Marcos opponent). This sparked the Presidential Snap Election between Corazon C. Aquino and Ferdinand Marcos three years later after the assassination. There claimed to be a fraud in this election that allowed Marcos to win presidency over Aquino. After this event of political unrest, countries around the world started to adopt the idea of peaceful protesting against strong opposition. Over the course of these events, this revolution had an effect on a global scale influencing the Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and protests in Tiananmen Square.