On a recent quiet afternoon, the aroma of freshly baked empanadas filled Zeni Mallari’s Peninsula home, where they were being served for merienda, a Filipino-style afternoon snack.
Over a fresh pot of tea and homemade baked pastries, veteran political activists Rodel and Edna Rodis joined Mallari and Gloria Navarrete to reminisce on the 39th anniversary of the People Power Revolution, the historic uprising that ousted a dictator in their native Philippines.
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On Feb. 24, 1986, the same day Filipinos took the streets of Manila, these longtime friends stood vigil at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco. Filipino Americans stood in solidarity with the millions who flooded Manila’s main artery, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, demanding that former President Ferdinand Marcos step down after more than 20 years in power.
The Bay Area, home to over 500,000 Filipino Americans, was reported to have played a crucial role in the revolution.
Linked by a shared goal of restoring democracy in the Philippines, the friends recalled how they never lost hope, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges.
“When we did the demonstration and we invaded the (Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco), we had CNN at our back,” said Mallari, who immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s. “And what we were doing in San Francisco was being broadcast in the Philippines. So the people in the Philippines knew that San Francisco was really behind them as well.”
Mallari’s husband, Ruben, led the Ninoy Aquino Movement, formed after the 1983 assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. to restore civil and political rights in the Philippines. She said pro-democracy leaders held rallies throughout the 1970s, but American media only covered them after Aquino’s assassination.
Rodel Rodis said their organizing efforts focused on pressuring the U.S. government to cut military aid to the Philippines amid widespread accusations of corruption and human rights abuses.
“We determined early on that the key to stopping Marcos was ending U.S. military aid to his dictatorship,” said Rodis, a San Francisco-based lawyer. “So from then on, our focus was lobbying Congress.”
In the wake of Aquino’s assassination, a Mercury News investigative team — Katherine Ellison, Peter Carey, Lewis Simons and editor Jonathan Krim — pursued a tip that revealed billions in Philippine public funds had been funneled into the U.S., mostly in real estate holdings for the Marcos family. Properties in San Francisco, across California, and in New York were often disguised under dummy corporations or linked to cronies.
Their reporting, published in 1985, helped fuel the growing movement against Marcos, in addition to the withdrawal of support by then President Ronald Reagan, making conditions ripe for revolution.
“I remember being in San Francisco and watching the very beginnings of it and thinking, wow, that looks dramatic,” Ellison said, reflecting on their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation. “And next thing I knew, I was on a plane there with Karen Borchers, our wonderful photographer.”
The urgency of collaborating with foreign journalists was rooted in the crackdown on the Philippine press a decade earlier.
Marcos’ declaration of martial law in 1972, which suspended most civil liberties, shuttered what had been Asia’s freest press. With opposition leaders jailed or exiled, foreign correspondents and international media collaboration became critical.
“It was a time pumped up by adrenaline, a combination of hope and fear,” said veteran journalist Marites Vitug, now editor-at-large at Manila-based news site Rappler. “Foreign correspondents helped tremendously by reporting vigorously on the Marcoses. … I remember photocopying the San Jose Mercury News articles on the Marcoses’ wealth and sharing them with others.”
Vitug recalled that while Marcos officially lifted martial law in 1981, the regime continued monitoring the press closely.
“Many of us engaged in what was called ‘Xerox journalism.’ We had no access to the information the San Jose Mercury News had, so it was shocking to learn about Marcos’ hidden wealth,” Vitug said. “Filipinos and allies in the U.S. would send us articles, and these reports opened our eyes. We tried to build on the investigations of our foreign counterparts. They were instrumental in helping hold the regime accountable.”
Two months after the People Power Revolution ended, Mercury News won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Ellison recalled that in Manila, the mood following the revolution was jubilant.
“People were celebrating, and documents (at the presidential palace) were scattered all over the floor,” she said.
But not all Filipinos in the Bay Area supported regime change.
Cherie Querol Moreno, a longtime journalist, was the associate editor in the mid-1980s of Philippine News, a Peninsula-based Filipino-American newspaper founded by well-known community leader Alex Esclamado, which aimed to fill information gaps created by a stifled press in the Philippines.
She recalled how their newspaper sought to report what their counterparts in the Philippines could not, and the deep divisions within the diaspora that persist to this day.
In the final days of the Marcos regime, Filipino-American journalists were “hunkered down in the Philippine News offices in South San Francisco, constantly on the phones, churning out stories from reports from contacts in the Philippines and around the world,” Moreno said.
“The community was divided,” Moreno said. “Even my own family was split. My dad was an opposition columnist, while a cousin worked at the consulate.”
Navarrete, who opened her South San Francisco home for political meetings almost weekly in the 1970s and 1980s, remains politically engaged to this day.
Nearly 40 years after the peaceful revolt, Marcos’ son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is now president after winning the 2022 election — a disappointing turn of events for Navarrete. However, she said she is not deterred.
“The lesson is we must stay active with the Filipino community here and abroad because we still love our home country, and we will not forsake them,” Navarrete said. “We’re here for them, too.”