As we mark the 40th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution, some might choose to lament what they see as its unfulfilled promise.

Four decades of post-Marcos democracy have brought fluctuating fortunes: incremental gains in democratic governance, persistent inequities in wealth and power distribution.

Critics argue that EDSA merely restored pre-Marcos elites to power, leaving the same challenges we faced in 1986: poverty, accountability, justice.

But here in Mindanao, we understand EDSA differently. We know both its promise and its continuing call.

Heroes from our island

EDSA’s spirit was never confined to that stretch of highway in Metro Manila. It lived in the courage of Mindanawons who resisted dictatorship long before those four extraordinary days in February 1986, and who continued the struggle for democracy afterward.

We remember the leaders of the Mindanao Alliance – Reuben Canoy, Nene Pimentel, and Homobono Adaza – who stood up against Marcos and prevailed right here in my home city of Cagayan de Oro. Their courage in organizing opposition when doing so meant imprisonment, exile, or worse, laid the groundwork for EDSA’s triumph.

We remember the Davao Three – Laurente “Larry” Ilagan, Marcos “Boy” Risonar, and Antonio Arellano – human rights lawyers arrested and detained in 1985 for defending the oppressed, whose case became a rallying cause for lawyers nationwide.

Larry and Boy have left us but Tony, who is Dean of University of Mindanao College of Law, is still active and I am proud to claim him as a friend.

We remember Alex Orcullo, whose advocacy for press freedom and human rights echoed across our island. I wept when I heard the news of his assassination, gunned down for speaking truth to power. His death reminded us that the price of freedom is never paid once and for all, but demanded again and again from those brave enough to defend it.

We remember the student activists I met when I was teaching at Xavier University in the 1980s. Bright, passionate, idealistic young people who believed so deeply in justice that many joined the NPA and gave their lives to the struggle. Some died fighting government forces. Others died in the infamous purges of Kampanyang Ahos, killed unjustifiably by their own comrades in a tragic betrayal of the ideals they sacrificed everything for.

Their deaths remind us that revolutionary movements, like all human endeavors, are capable of terrible wrongs, even as they pursue justice.

I honor Ed Quitoriano, also my former philosophy student at Xavier University, who rose through the ranks to become a top leader of the New People’s Army. Ed eventually returned to civilian life and channeled his extraordinary experience into what is arguably the finest account ever written of the communist movement in Mindanao: Deeper Ground, Darker Shadows, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

It is the memoir of a seminarian turned revolutionary, a man who had the courage not only to fight but eventually to reflect, honestly and unflinchingly, on what the movement achieved and where it went terribly wrong.

As someone who have engaged with the Mindanao Commission of the CPP for decades, and as recently as the early 2020s, Ed’s book has been very helpful to understand the state of the movement in  Mindanao and its continuing shortcomings, especially in dealing with allies.

We also remember Jorge “Ka Oris” Madlos, a student activist who went underground when Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and continued fighting for social justice even after EDSA.

I remember my high school mate Nido Nabong. He joined the New Peoples Army as a young college graduate and stayed in the struggle for four decades until he was killed by the military a few years ago,

And I remember my own uncle, Fr. Emy La Viña, a revolutionary priest who lived the Church’s preferential option for the poor. He was my first mentor in social justice work.

These heroes showed us that EDSA’s essence was not a single moment of collective courage, but a sustained commitment to freedom, justice, and human dignity.

The Unfinished Struggle

Yet 40 years later, Mindanao still wrestles with challenges that mock EDSA’s promise. The Duterte years brought devastating human rights violations that scarred our island and our nation. Extrajudicial killings became policy. Dissent was criminalized. The rule of law bent to the will of power.

The International Criminal Court now investigates these abuses, a painful reminder that justice delayed is not justice denied, merely postponed.

Our Lumad communities continue to suffer systematic oppression. Bakwit schools, those brave experiments in indigenous education and resistance, face harassment and closure. Communities defending their ancestral domains against extractive industries and militarization pay with displacement, intimidation, sometimes their lives.

This is not the freedom EDSA promised.

The Bangsamoro peace process represents both EDSA’s promise and its complexities. The Bangsamoro Organic Law, born from decades of struggle and dialogue, offers genuine autonomy and self-determination.

But a brewing crisis now threatens to imperil everything we have built. Political tensions within the Bangsamoro government, unresolved grievances, and the slow pace of reform strain the fragile peace. Above all, the Marcos government has fully inserted itself into MILF internal dynamics sowing distrust and accusations of bad faith.

Without sustained commitment from all sides, we risk sliding back into cycles of violence that consumed generations in the Bangsamoro region.

Equally critical is the stalled peace process with the National Democratic Front. When negotiations collapsed under the Duterte administration, Mindanao lost more than a process. We lost the possibility of addressing the root causes of insurgency: landlessness, poverty, marginalization of indigenous peoples.

Ka Oris himself joined peace negotiations with the Aquino government in 1986, only to be arrested when talks broke down in 1987. His death in 2021 under disputed circumstances reminds us that military solutions alone cannot build lasting peace.

The tragedy of the Kampanyang Ahos – where the movement killed its own members based on suspicion and paranoia – demands that any future peace process include truth-telling and accountability for all sides.

Land reform, indigenous rights, social services, genuine local autonomy: these are not merely NDF demands but the unrealized promises of EDSA itself.

Democracy’s Daily Demand

Cardinal Sin called Filipinos to EDSA not knowing if soldiers would shoot or tanks would crush them. By God’s grace and those soldiers’ compassion, we survived without bloodbath. That miracle was not merely unseating a dictator, but discovering our capacity for collective courage.

If EDSA’s promise feels unfulfilled, perhaps we misunderstand what was promised. EDSA never guaranteed instant prosperity or automatic justice. It promised something harder: the opportunity to build democracy through our own sustained effort.

Freedom is not a finished state. It is a daily practice.

We have proven our capacity for extraordinary courage in extraordinary times. But what about heroism in ordinary times?

Where is our courage to sustain democracy through the unglamorous work of building institutions, holding leaders accountable, linking arms across differences to address climate change, indigenous rights, equitable development?

EDSA is a major avenue in Metro Manila, but its spirit belongs in the streets and alleys of Cagayan de Oro, Davao, Cotabato, Butuan, Surigao, Jolo, Malaybalay, Ozamis, Dipolog, Pagadian, Marawi, Zamboanga.

It lives wherever Mindanawons gather to defend rights, demand accountability, build peace, protect the vulnerable.

The late President Corazon Aquino spoke of how EDSA and hope for Philippine democracy were partners. Sometimes I see more division than partnership in our politics. We have yet to fully achieve EDSA’s compassion.

A Promise We Owe

Perhaps it is time we stop speaking of EDSA’s promise to us and instead speak of the promise we owe to EDSA.

We owe it to those who gave their lives – to Canoy and Pimentel and Adaza, to Ilagan and Risonar and Arellano, to Alex Orcullo whose assassination still moves me to tears, to my uncle Fr. Emy, to the Moro revolutionaries, to those Xavier student activists who believed in justice enough to die for it – to live their courage in the small moments of our democratic lives.

We owe it to the Lumad to protect their rights and honor their stewardship of ancestral lands.

We owe it to victims of human rights violations to pursue justice through the ICC and our own courts.

We owe it to the Bangsamoro to shore up their peace process before the current crisis destroys decades of painstaking progress.

We owe it to communities caught in conflict zones to pursue genuine peace talks that address root causes, not just symptoms.

We owe it to ourselves to rebuild civic pride and participation, to see the prosaic tasks of citizenship as equally heroic as facing down tanks: engaging our leaders constructively, working to solve challenges in our own barangays and municipalities, linking arms in ordinary times as we did in extraordinary ones.

Christ spoke of faithfulness in small things. Democracy demands the same attention to detail. Those who gave their lives for our freedom deserve no less from us.

This is EDSA’s promise to Mindanao: that our struggles for justice, peace, indigenous rights, and environmental protection are not peripheral to Philippine democracy but central to it.

And this is Mindanao’s promise to EDSA: that we will keep faith with that revolution’s spirit through the daily, difficult, essential work of building a democracy that truly serves all its people – through genuine autonomy for the Bangsamoro, through dialogue that replaces armed conflict, through addressing the injustices that fuel insurgency, through honoring all who sacrificed for justice even when their own movements betrayed them.

This is what we ought to celebrate on this 40th anniversary. This is the promise we owe to EDSA.

(Dean Tony La Viña is from Cagayan de Oro and is currently the director of Klima Center of Manila Observatory and managing partner of La Viña Zarate and Associates, a development and social change law firm. He is the former dean of the Ateneo School of Government and is the founding Chair of the Mindanao Climate Justice Resource Facility and the Mindanao Center for Scholarships, Sports, and Spirituality and the founding president of the Movement Against Disinformation. He teaches in many law schools and university, including in Mindanao.)