DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 25 February) — Forty years ago, the air in General Santos City didn’t just carry the tropical heat of February 1986; it carried a weight that buzzed just beneath the skin.

It was a feeling we’d all carried since February 7, when the snap election had been held and, we knew, stolen. 

The dictator had rigged it. We all knew the truth: Cory Aquino had won the people’s trust, but Marcos had the ballots, the soldiers, and the dictator’s power. 

In the weeks that followed, the opposition in GenSan and South Cotabato, from the YS (youth and students), professionals, enlightened local officials, church groups to farmer and worker leaders, had begun organizing civil disobedience—a quiet, determined refusal to accept the lie.

As the then chair of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines, Gen. Santos-South Cotabato chapter, I was right in the thick of it with the other student leaders. 

As young campus journalists, our minds were sharpened by the very act of editing our college papers about stories of the excesses and brutalities of the dictatorship, and we were furious. 

We knew the truth, and we were ready to fight for it, with words, and, if need be, with our presence in the frontlines to oust the dictator Marcos. 

Then, on the afternoon of February 22, the spark we were waiting for finally caught fire. 

The time for writing editorials in the safety of a newsroom had ended.

The news crackled through the grapevine: Enrile and Ramos had broken away from Marcos. They were holed up in two military camps in Manila, and the people were being called to support them. The revolt had begun; it was breathing down our necks.

We didn’t hesitate. The plan we’d vaguely discussed for days snapped into sharp focus. 

A group of us – student and youth activists (my close buddy Ariel, Busoy, Boyax, Natnat, Tito, Malou, Emily, Jojo, Jinkay, among others) – fanned out across the city. We went to my alma mater, the Notre Dame of Dadiangas, to the other colleges, moving from classroom to classroom, our voices urgent with the news. “They’ve walked out in Manila!” we’d say. “The people are gathering at EDSA! We have to show them they are not alone!” 

You could see the shift in the students’ eyes — uncertainty turning to resolve. 

It was a transformative moment to witness. Books were closed, bags were slung over shoulders, and one by one, students walked out of their classrooms. 

We formed a ragged, determined column and took to the streets for a march rally, a sympathy protest for the distant revolution.

In an era before smartphones, livestreaming and social media, our lifeline, our connection to the heart of the storm, was DXCP. 

The Catholic-run radio station became our oracle. It would go silent for a moment, then crackle back to life, relaying the broadcasts from Radio Veritas in Manila.

We’d huddle around any transistor radio we could find, straining to hear every word over the noise of the city. 

These names became familiar: EDSA, Camp Aguinaldo, Camp Crame. We heard about the nuns praying on the front lines, the people offering food and flowers to the soldiers. It felt both impossibly far away and intimately close, all at once.

By nightfall, we had gathered for a vigil at the very grounds of DXCP. It felt like the safest place to be, the heart of our own truth. 

The crowd was a living mosaic of the city’s soul: students in their school uniforms; workers still smelling of the tuna canneries and banana plantations; urban poor residents from city’s coastal outskirts; farmers with soil-stained hands; priests and nuns clutching actual rosaries; lawyers and other professionals. 

Hundreds, maybe a thousand of us by then, a small but fierce echo of the multitude gathering on EDSA. 

The scene was a living portrait of our resistance in this corner of the land of broken promises.

I stood among them, perhaps the oddest sight of all. 

I was wearing a campaign shirt I’d found—a red-and-white remnant of the regime emblazoned with the dictator’s face and the defiant slogan: “MARCOS PA RIN” (Marcos Still).

But I had edited it. That afternoon, before the march, I’d taken a red pen and, in bold, angry strokes, scrawled across the bottom of the shirt two words : “ANG DIKTADOR.” The Dictator. 

MARCOS PA RIN ANG DIKTADOR! 

It was my own walking editorial — countering a lie of a shirt overwritten by the truth of the red ink. 

The snap election was a sham; it was done more to pander the dictator’s 

American imperialist masters than to restore democracy. 

He was not “still” our president; he was and had always been dictator, and his time was up. 

The night deepened, and the vigil took a strange duality of peace and peril. 

We sang protest hymns and shared bread, but we never took our eyes off the shadows.

At the edges of the DXCP grounds, the regime was still very much present. 

We could see the silhouettes of the police, the Philippine Constabulary and the army – dark and unmoving under the streetlights. They were the silent, menacing counterpoint to our prayers.

Every time a jeepney backfired or a voice raised too loud, the tension spiked. 

Would they charge? Would they disperse us? Would they move in? Would the long arm of Malacañang reach this far south tonight?

The first night of the revolt, even in our GenSan then, was a night of held breath.

But the mood wasn’t just vigilant; it was militant. It was a quiet, steel-eyed determination. 

Looking around at the faces lit by the occasional flicker of a candle or the distant glow of a lamp, I felt it. We were ready. Ready to stand our ground, ready to face whatever came. 

We were so far from the barricades of EDSA, but we were building our own barricade of solidarity here, in the grounds of DXCP. We were ready to make the final push, at all cost, to oust the dictator.

(Carlos Isagani Zarate was a student activist and leader during the Marcos dictatorship, and was chair of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines for the General Santos City-South Cotabato chapter  during the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolt. His activism during the Marcos dictatorship shaped his  commitment to social justice. He served as Representative of the Bayan party list from 2013 to 2022. As a legislator, he remained a staunch critic of administrations perpetuating martial law-era policies, particularly opposing the Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs and the Marcos family’s political resurgence, embodying the continuation of the resistance he first found as a young student journalist in Mindanao. He is now a Senior Adviser and Counsel of the Klima Center of the Manila Observatory and Partner of the La Viña Zarate & Associates.)