The reality is, there were two Edsas during Edsa Dos, the sixth anniversary of which went virtually unnoticed last week. The first was the Edsa Dos of popular memory; the second was the Edsa Dos of the pros, the same pros who’ve reduced Edsa Dos to an unattractive sample of currency. The Edsa Dos which only came to light in subsequent interviews, and most notably in Amando Doronila’s book, “The Fall of Joseph Estrada.”
This Edsa Dos had many faces, all working behind the scenes. There was Chavit Singson who wanted revenge for being stripped of his rackets and the target of an assassination plot. There was civil society, disillusioned with Estrada; there were the politicians still smarting from their defeat in 1998, and big business in a panic over the midnight cabinet.
We all remember that some national leaders had drawn a line in the sand as early as October 2000. Teofisto Guingona Jr. had pointed an accusing finger in a speech; Chavit Singson had spilled the beans; Cardinal Sin had announced Estrada had lost the moral right to lead; by November, Civil Society and Cory Aquino had called for Estrada to resign. But still, and we often forget this, even as the second part of Edsa Dos had already formed its ranks, the first Edsa Dos was still nowhere to be found. Opinion polls at the time said, the people wanted to wait and see, watch and learn, witness the impeachment.
It was the second envelope that made Edsa Dos an Edsa. Just as the computer tabulators had walked out of the Comelec counting in 1986, so did the impeachment team walk of the Senate when senators voted to suppress the evidence. Enough was enough. And the public had had enough of a Senate that blundered its way into infamy, led by Kit Tatad, who made the motion to take a vote on the opening of that envelope.
Tatad even wrote a book, “A Nation on Fire,” to justify that historic vote; and this is how he described his colleague, Tessie Aquino Oreta: “She did not know how to respond to the crowd,” Tatad wrote. “In the end she decided to turn away with a gentle waving of the hand and swaying of the hips.” Thus did Tatad try to whitewash the most notorious little dance since Hitler’s hop of joy over the fall of France. Is it any surprise these two have never recovered politically since?
And it wasn’t surprising, either, that the public got fed up when the allies of President Estrada thought they’d won the numbers game - but had forgotten that beside each senator-judge, in a sense, were tens of thousands of viewers and listeners also serving as jurors in Estrada’s trial.
But that was the first Edsa Dos, the people who spontaneously went to the Edsa Shrine, and went back, and back, for three days.
The other Edsa Dos, the political players, viewed things from a more strategic point of view.
The president’s husband, Atty. Miguel Arroyo, talking to Nick Joaquin in an interview published on March 5, 2001, said there were three plans afoot.
Plan A was Gen. Renato de Villa’s. It focused on the Chief of Staff Angelo Reyes, and the service commanders to withdraw support. De Villa warned that if an untimely move against the government was made, the military would automatically defend it.
Then there was what Atty. Arroyo called Plan B, hatched by Luis “Chavit” Singson, Estrada’s nemesis. Plan B involving elements of the military striking the first blow. Entire classes of alumni of the Philippine Military Academy would withdraw support. Class 1971, then 1972, and so on.
And it seems, there was Plan C, put together by what the president’s husband called “our group.” Explainee, can you read Atty. Arroyo’s words?
“In every place where Erap loyalists had a force, we had a counterforce to face it, with orders to shoot. And not only in Metro Manila. Carillo had already been sent to the provinces; and in Nueva Ecija, for instance, we had Rabosa. This was a fight to the finish. That’s why those five days that Erap was demanding were so important. He was counting on countercoups and baliktaran.”
So at the first Edsa Dos, students, professionals, and the rest of the citizenry protested in the streets, the second Edsa Dos applied pressure on the armed forces. On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 19, 2001, all the heads of the major commands of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) withdrew their support from President Estrada. “Gentlemen,” Chief of Staff Angelo de los Reyes told his fellow top brass, “we are committing mutiny.”
Estrada, we should remember, by this time, had decided to throw in the towel. He’d appeared on TV calling for snap elections in May 2001, in which he would not even be a candidate. But he wanted some things in exchange. The five bargaining points that were never ironed out, according to Tatad, Angara, and Doronila, were:
We know at least two versions of a letter of resignation were considered; that exile was proposed, and rejected; and that the opponents of Estrada would not budge on the five-day grace period because as we saw, they feared a counterstrike by Estrada. But Estrada - without a Cabinet, with the armed forces and the police refusing to obey his orders, without a bureaucracy, and with his countrymen rallying against him in the streets - knew the game was up.
And yet among his opponents, a division took place among the leaders gathered at the Edsa Shrine that prevented a neater resolution. Some wanted to march on the Palace; Cory Aquino and Cardinal Sin opposed such a move, but at 1:00 in the morning of Jan. 20, Raul Roco announced that people would march on the Palace and Estrada had until 6 that morning to resign.
Panganiban later explained that the country, already lacking a functioning government, was now headed toward a real revolution: “The country was faced with an extraordinary situation that demanded an extraordinary solution. Only one state institution, the Supreme Court, had the credibility and the moral authority to avert a governmental catastrophe. And there was only one person who could steer the country from armed confrontation and upheaval: Chief Justice Davide. His outstanding performance as presiding officer of the impeachment court made him - per a scientific poll survey - the most trusted Filipino.”
Though critics point out that Davide lacked the will to order the resumption of the trial, at the time the moderates turned to him to rescue the constitutional setup. Panganiban says he had an early morning conversation with the chief justice who said that if asked, he would swear in the vice president as acting president.
A fax accordingly arrived in the Supreme Court at 11:26 a.m. on Saturday Jan. 20, 2001. An hour later, the vice president took her oath as, depending on how you recall that fateful event, acting or full and actual, president.
Estrada’s final act in the Palace was to sign a letter, which said he would go, for the sake of peace, but that he doubted the legality of what had happened.
And while the United States government issued an official statement saying it believed Estrada had resigned, an American journalist, Anthony Spaeth, would pen an article that began a furious debate: Was Edsa Dos a coup or People Power?
The defining issue of Edsa Dos was that Estrada refused to sign a letter of resignation, because it came without the guarantees he wanted. So the Supreme Court said, he had lost the capacity to govern and someone else must take his place. Estrada decided to run away to fight another day. The fight has been going on ever since.
But possession, as they say, is nine-tenths of the law. Estrada, in the eyes of many members of civil society, should be locked up and tried in a proper court of law. Yet Estrada had hoped giving up power would buy him safety.
Korea had imprisoned and imposed sentences on two previous presidents, so why couldn’t Filipinos? The problem was those two presidents hadn’t been elected, while Estrada had received the biggest mandate since 1992. We’ve imprisoned presidents before. No one protested when an unelected president, Jose P. Laurel, was charged with treason and detained. But he lacked what Estrada had - a mandate, the first unquestionable one since 1969.
And those responsible for that mandate, though they’d stayed home during Edsa Dos, came out in the streets in turn, when an Estrada who’d gone home to a disgraceful early retirement, was arrested and locked up. 101 days after Edsa Dos, a new Edsa took place, and it called itself Edsa Tres.
