Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Thursday said he is against “institutionalizing” the commemoration of the 1986 EDSA People Power revolution that catapulted Corazon “Cory” Aquino to the presidency, describing it as “self-contradiction.”
During EDSA’s first anniversary, he recalled it was mostly the people of former President Ferdinand Marcos who were present. “The real heroes didn’t show up then nor after; they’d done their part,” he said.
Locsin’s opposition to the public celebration of EDSA was reflected in a blog he wrote on February 24, 2017, where he said that EDSA People Power was a private act of courage and conviction on a mass scale and was staged against the government.
“The EDSA Revolution is best commemorated—and the event celebrated—in the heart. That is the only imperishable location for a fitting commemoration,” he wrote several months before President Duterte appointed him as DFA secretary.
In his blog, he wrote: “Each of the people who went to EDSA expected to stand there alone against government."
Instead of commemorating it with a government and public event, Locsin proposed the "construction of a gigantic cathedral -- like the Sagrada Familia” in Barcelona, Spain.
“I wanted instead a gigantic cathedral, like near 100-year old Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, still unfinished, that would take as long to complete out of private contributions as it took the Filipino people to wake up from their mental and moral lethargy and destroy the dictatorship,” he said.
He remembered that the EDSA People Power revolution has proved wrong the U.S. Sen. (D-Montana) Mike Mansfield who, during the Marcos years, defined the Philippines as “40 million cowards and one son of a bitch.”
“It took 13 years, many extrajudicial murder, wholesale official robbery, one willing martyr, and his widow and the Catholic Church. God had intervened in history before our very eyes, theologians said,” he said in a separate tweet.
Locsin served as Presidential Speechwriter and Legal Adviser under President Corazon Aquino.