When the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Quezon City government issued their guidelines, mostly prohibitions, for the 40th anniversary of the People Power revolt on Wednesday, February 25, something felt wrong. Not just legally, but spiritually. 

EDSA 1986 was a spontaneous eruption of difference. It found common cause without asking permission.

Here we are, 40 years later, told what signs to carry. We are told where to stand. We are told which sentiments were acceptable. This, on the very highway that once swallowed a million contradictions called freedom.

Let us be direct about the constitutional question. No permit is required for a march or rally. None. 

The right to peaceful assembly is not a privilege. It is a right that citizens exercise upon decision.

The Supreme Court has been clear across decades of jurisprudence. Government may regulate time, place, and manner of assemblies. But it may not require prior approval of content. It may not pre-screen slogans. It may not audit posters and streamers. It may not demand that speeches be submitted for review.

When the PNP began listing tolerated and prohibited messages, it crossed a line. That is not crowd management. That is censorship. And censorship at a People Power commemoration is not irony. It is insult.

EDSA on the 25th should be declared a freedom park. The entire stretch of it. Open to all, unconditionally. No approved themes. No vetted slogans. No official narrative imposed on participants. A freedom park needs no permit. It asks no permission. That is what EDSA 1986 actually was.

Hold the space

Joy Belmonte is not an ordinary local executive. She is a visionary leader. She has shown that governance can be efficient and humane. As a citizen of her city, I have witnessed living in a city that does not condescend to its people. In QC, we feel celebrated by our local government.

Mayor Joy is also the daughter of two icons of Philippine democracy. 

Her father, Speaker Sonny Belmonte, defended constitutional processes for decades. Her mother, Betty Go Belmonte, is in a category unto herself. She kept the free press alive under martial law. That was genuinely dangerous work. She did not ask Marcos for permission to tell the truth. She found ways to tell it anyway.

It is in that spirit that I appeal to Mayor Belmonte. The city does not need to manage the message. It needs to hold the space. 

The highest thing Quezon City could do was simply say: this highway is yours. Bring whatever you believe. We will keep you safe while you say it.

That is the Belmonte tradition. That is what Betty Go Belmonte’s life argued for. Mayor Joy carries that argument in her blood. She is exactly the leader who could make that declaration with authority and conviction.

The Quezon City pronouncements, as issued, followed a paternalistic logic. Celebrate EDSA, but celebrate it our way. 

There is deep irony in that. A local government invoking People Power to restrict people’s power is a contradiction. 

EDSA 1986 did not ask Marcos for a permit. It showed up in all its messy, prayerful, defiant plurality. And it held.

Kiko Dee and the tradition he carries

Then there is Kiko Dee. I want to speak here with candor and affection. My admiration for this young man is real. It is inseparable from my admiration for his family.

His grandfather Howard Dee is one of the finest public servants the Philippines has produced. A man of deep faith, rigorous principle, and genuine courage. I worked closely with Ambassador Dee in the 1990s. We worked together on peace negotiations, environmental advocacy, and indigenous peoples issues. I saw firsthand how he held together people of radically different persuasions. He pursued something always larger than any of them.

I was in my early 30s then. I am not embarrassed to say that I wanted to be an Ambassador Howard later in life.

Kiko’s grandmother Cory and his grandfather Ninoy gave this country back to itself. His uncle Noynoy carried that legacy with quiet dignity. 

Kiko Dee did not choose this lineage. But he has chosen to honor it. That choice commands respect.

Which is why his attempt to articulate a framework of unity deserves serious engagement. He was trying to do something genuinely difficult. He wanted to name what EDSA stands for. He wanted to protect the occasion’s moral integrity from partisan cooptation. 

That impulse is not wrong. The 40th anniversary needed that kind of voice.

The question is not his intent but the instrument. When a framework of unity becomes a list of what is allowed, it begins doing the work of exclusion. 

Articulating convergence is valuable. Gatekeeping convergence is something else entirely.

Howard Dee understood this distinction deeply. He spent years in rooms where people disagreed about almost everything. Through patient and principled engagement, he found the slender threads of shared humanity. 

That is the tradition Kiko Dee inherits. It is a tradition more capacious than any list of approved messages.

Kiko Dee’s framework might have landed differently as an invitation. Not: here is who belongs and who does not. But rather: here is what we are reaching for. Here is why it is worth reaching together. That reframing would have honored both his instinct for unity and EDSA’s own tradition of uncomfortable, overcrowded, glorious solidarity.

Wide enough for everyone

EDSA is a long and wide highway. It has room. It always had room. 

In February 1986, that highway held nuns and soldiers. It held communists and businessmen. It held Marcos loyalists who had second thoughts. It held opposition figures who had harbored quiet doubts.

In EDSA, there were hundreds of military rebels and people who supported them, ready to die to defy a dictatorship.

Think about the irony of what is now being prohibited in the EDSA@40 gathering.

Indeed, EDSA held people who agreed on almost nothing. 

Except that something had to change.

EDSA worked not because everyone wanted the same future. It worked because they stood together long enough in the same present. And something impossible happened.

The police is treating EDSA@40 as a traffic management problem. Quezon City is treating it as a permit application. 

Both forget that February 22 to 25, 1986 was not a permitted event. Nobody filed anything. Nobody got approval. The people simply came, in their hundreds of thousands. They carried whatever they believed. And the sheer fact of their coming changed history.

No permit was necessary then. No permit should be necessary now. Not for the march. Not for the rally. Not for the poster. Not for the streamer. Not for the speech.

Mayor Joy Belmonte still has time. Future anniversaries will come. The invitation stands: declare EDSA a freedom park every 25th of February. Trust your mother’s tradition. Trust the highway.

We do not honor 1986 by demanding everyone carry the same sign. We honor it by keeping the highway open. We honor it by trusting that the width of the road is itself a democratic value. And by doing the harder, longer work of finding common ground amid all the noise.

EDSA is not a monument. It is a method. The method requires that we accommodate the discomfort of difference. While refusing to abandon the search for convergence.

That search cannot begin if we have already decided who is allowed to show up. – Rappler.com