Huge crowds gathered in Manila yesterday to pay their respects to former President Corazon Aquino who died over the weekend. Media reports suggest that the turnout was the largest since a million people mobilized in the 1986 ”people power” revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos and brought Aquino to power.
That event was the first of a series of people power-driven transitions to democracy that culminated in the color revolutions in post-communist Europe.
Michael Posner, the Obama administration’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, cited the events in his testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as one of a number of episodes highlighting the role the U.S. can play in promoting democracy and human rights.
“The promotion of democracy and human rights here, and around the world, helps define us – and who we are as a people,” he said. “I experienced it in the 1980s when President Reagan stood behind Philippine ‘people’s power’ and ensured a successful transition of power from Marcos to Aquino.”
Filipino people power “raised visions of new political paradigms”, one analyst suggests, a region which “continues to be hospitable to some ambivalent attitudes towards full-scope democracy” and in which governments “advance ‘smart’ arguments in defence of such attitudes.”
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