After a fraudulent election and the defection of key military leaders, Ferdinand Marcos boarded a US Air Force plane and fled Malacañang Palace on February 24, 1986. Millions of Filipinos had massed along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue for four days, blocking tanks with prayer, flowers, and sheer numbers, in a revolution that inspired later nonviolent movements worldwide.
The People Power Revolution reached its climax on February 24 when Ferdinand Marcos, besieged in Malacañang Palace, finally accepted that his regime was finished. Nuns knelt in front of tanks. Ordinary citizens brought food to soldiers who had been ordered to disperse them. Radio Veritas broadcast minute-by-minute updates that kept the crowds coordinated and unafraid.
Marcos made one last, surreal gesture: he was inaugurated for a new term on television that same day, in a ceremony almost nobody outside the palace walls believed in. Hours later, he and his wife Imelda boarded American helicopters and then a US Air Force jet bound for Hawaii, leaving behind a palace closet famously stuffed with over a thousand pairs of shoes.
Corazon Aquino, widow of assassinated opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., was sworn in as president that same day in a separate ceremony. The bloodless ouster of a entrenched dictator by unarmed civilians became a global template, influencing movements from Eastern Europe to the Arab world in the years that followed.
Key people: Ferdinand Marcos, Corazon Aquino, Juan Ponce Enrile, Fidel Ramos