It has been 31 years since our people took to the streets in peaceful revolt. I still remember those days. I was a shy and impressionable probinsiyana, and my time as a university student here at the School of Economics was of self-discovery and a growing awareness of the problems of our country. After all, one of UP's many strengths is the way it exposes you to the realities of the world, of the social and political issues that shape those realities.



In those final years of the Marcos dictatorship, all was not well. Resistance against Martial Law was gaining momentum. The people had awakened to the wholesale plunder and human rights abuses of the Marcos family, and they were ready to fight back. I had gotten a hold of a white paper written by our professors on our country's economic troubles. It was a bold and fearless document, debunking the lies that the Marcoses had peddled on the state of our economy.



You see, for a long time, Marcos maintained that the Philippine economy was in good shape. But the white paper showed us that this was far from the truth. Inflation had spiked to the double digits, and the prices of consumer goods were extremely high. Marcos borrowed huge sums domestically and overseas, but we found that the borrowings did not go to public infrastructure. Instead, the paper showed – factually and without doubt – that the funds were funneled away into the Marcoses' ambitions of wealth, state control, and total power.



As we know now, the assassination of Ninoy Aquino catalyzed the People Power Revolution. Enough was enough, the Filipino people said. For 3 days in February 1986, thousands of ordinary citizens peacefully marched to EDSA despite the risks: military tanks stood at attention and soldiers held their ready rifles, but they could not stop us. We wanted a government that would take care of the people, not destroy it. We wanted our freedoms restored under a democracy that was rightly ours. We wanted change, and we rose together to make that change possible.