Crowd Is Jubilant as Palace Gate Comes Crashing Down

Even before the four U.S. Air Force helicopters had lifted off from the parade ground of the palace with their reluctant cargo--a powerless president and his party--the swelling crowd had unfurled a banner: “Occupy the People’s Palace.”

The occupation was inevitable. Nothing less than standing on the grounds of the sprawling Malacanang Palace would satisfy these people.

Standing among the palace’s huge banyan trees and lighted fountains, one woman kept repeating--as though to remind herself of the historic moment--”Twenty years. Twenty years. Twenty years.”

Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, 68, had been president of the Philippines for 20 years, nine of those as head of a martial-law regime. Now he was gone. But even for the 11 other years, it had not been an administration that shared the national palace with its people.

“For me, this is the first time I’ve ever reached this soil since my birth,” said Boy Adrales, 36.

It was a thought expressed by many others who, like Adrales, made it into the palace grounds after crashing through a huge wrought-iron gate in the face of gunfire from the last of the palace guards.

Some of the men that the palace liberators faced did not know that their leader had fled.

“I love my president, and now is the time for me to die for my president,” said one of them, who identified himself only as Brix.

Brix said that he and scores of fellow Marcos supporters had come to the palace at 8 a.m. Monday. A navy captain issued .45-caliber pistols and M-16 rifles to some of them.

During the tense hours before the crowd finally crashed through the gate, many of the men had used those weapons. At least two people were killed and dozens injured in the street battles outside the palace’s No. 4 gate. Again and again, demonstrators and loyalists dived for cover when the gunfire began, only to re-emerge moments later with bottles, rocks and knives.

Several times, the Marcos loyalists dragged their dead and wounded through a small opening in the 10-foot gates. One victim had been set upon by the mob of opposition demonstrators and stabbed to death before several priests in the crowd began chanting the rosary and praying for peace.

When the large gate finally did come crashing down, Brix, who survived the final street battles, was near tears. “Now our country will belong to the Communists,” he lamented before being swept away into the jubilant crowd surging onto the grounds.

By then, more than three hours after the Marcos party had left, the dominant emotion among the people appeared to be joy, even reverence. Surprisingly, there was little anger.

Attempts by hard-line leftists in the crowd to convert the triumphant moment into something else failed. One banner, reflecting an attempt to link the new president, Corazon Aquino, with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said “Reject U.S.-Sponsored Fascist Coalition Government.” It was mostly ignored.

A large poster of Aquino and her vice presidential running mate, Salvador Laurel, was mounted on the balcony of the ceremonial residence, not far from the spot where, hours before, Marcos had attempted to legitimize his dying presidency by having himself sworn in at a special ceremony before a few hundred allies.

Although there was some looting in office complexes adjacent to the presidential residences and its glass-fronted, elegant guest house, citizens in the crowd quickly organized volunteer cordons to keep vandals away.

“We are all very happy. Let us be humble in victory,” urged a Msgr. Lopez, a Roman Catholic cleric, speaking to a crowd that appeared on the verge of spilling into the Marcos family’s private residence.

“We have to preserve this place for our next president,” said another self-appointed guard, John Magdaraog, 25. “I would just like to look over this place. I don’t like people to loot it.”

The seemingly endless tide of Manila residents who came to the Malacanang grounds on the banks of the Pasig River included some who admitted having supported Marcos in the Feb. 7 election.

“I campaigned for Marcos during this election. I admit it,” Alvin Quizon, 30, said. “But I feel it is my duty as a Filipino to come here. I feel that history is unfolding right before my very eyes.”

Before the crowd entered the palace grounds, there had been great tension around the compound. On one end of Mendiola Street, which runs in front of the palace, a gang of stick-wielding Marcos supporters had gathered, challenging, like street toughs, anyone who ventured onto their turf.

At the other end of the street, directly in front of the Mendiola Bridge, where police and demonstrators had clashed many times during Marcos years, was a large, very well-organized demonstration by members of a Philippine leftist organization, Bayan.

Bayan is a confederation of leftist groups, including several composed of radical Catholic priests and nuns. In front of the Bayan crowd was a candle-lit straw altar to the Virgin Mary, flanked by red flags bearing Communist insignia. Priests and nuns formed a cordon at the very front, linking arms to prevent the crowd from surging out of control.

Among the priests was an American, Father Arnold Boehme, from Minneapolis. “I was visiting and decided to stick around for the action this week,” he said, smiling as he stood between the increasingly impatient Bayan crowd and about 100 soldiers stationed in front of the Marcos loyalists and the palace.

The discipline of the Bayan leftists may have saved many lives. By delaying the crowd’s rush until most soldiers and loyalists inside had been able to disperse, the leaders almost certainly avoided additional bloodshed. Those demonstrators who were shot or killed had broken away from the main crowd.

As a result, it was a respectful but joyous celebration when hundreds of thousands of Manilans poured into the streets to make a pilgrimage to the place where Marcos held forth for 20 years. To many of them, he was the only president they had known.

The street and palace grounds soon rang to the cacophony of rock ‘n’ roll and political chants. Parents brought young children, and lovers leaned against one another in the place where, hours before, men had died in a spray of automatic weapons fire.

Under a full moon, these thousands in the city of Manila, on the island of Luzon in the Republic of the Philippines, had apparently come, not to make a political revolution and topple a tyrant, but to stroll in a people’s park.