Rewriting a revolution

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What if the 2027 SAP deadline wasn't a burden, but an opportunity? I'm Nishita Henry, special host of Resilient Edge, a business vitality podcast paid and presented by Deloitte. Discover how Deloitte, AWS, and SAP are helping enterprises move faster, operate smarter, and unlock AI value they didn't know was possible. Available now wherever you listen to podcasts. America is changing, and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.

0:43I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:0140 years ago, a million people faced down tanks and helicopter gunships on a highway in the Philippines. It was the final act of an uprising that ended the two-decade-long reign of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. These were serious things, but you can't get scared in the middle of a million people anymore. It was like, okay, here we are. Let's get on with this thing. Suddenly, all of the tanks rumbled into action. They were so camouflaged, I didn't see. There were hundreds of troops lying on the ground. And then when they stood up, oh my God. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Sheila Coronel, an investigative journalist from Columbia University in New York.

1:52And this is Rewriting a Revolution. I ask you to let your voices be heard. Coriakino led the opposition to Marcos. I ask you to let the people's power be felt. I ask you to send this message to the pharaohs in language unmistakable and clear. Let our people go. Let the Philistine people go. Marian Roses is a curator. She joined a crowd along Manila's central arterial, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA. It is really sweat besides sweat. It is really bodies touching. I don't think you have an experience like that anymore. If it didn't happen the way it did, then you'd be dead. That is serious.

2:51It wasn't playtime. People linked arms, prayed the rosary, offered flowers to the troops, and the soldiers refused to fire. It was a religious experience. It's our religious experience. Eventually people came with their own statues of saints, and the icons served to show female energy, because it's mostly Virgin Mary. And when it comes to dire situations, it's the female energy actually in the old Austronesian world that becomes a fighter. The old culture is still there. This is not Christianity.

3:36Inside the palace, Mr. Marcos is still clinging to power. I warn the opposition, do not compel me to move into extremes that you already know of. If necessary, I will do so. The Americans have publicly called on him to step down and avoid bloodshed. Mr. Marcos insists he will be inaugurated president as scheduled in the morning, but supporters of the opposition leader Cori Aquino say she'll be made president before then.

4:10Mr. Marcos has hardly left his palace since the phony elections destroyed his government's credibility over two weeks ago.

4:20And at the president's front gate, Mrs. Aquino supporters pushed their luck to the limit. The troops had orders to open fire in defense of government property, but the mob was determined to remove the barbwire barricades.

4:38But it was all too much for Mr. Marcus's palace guard. They fired into the air to frighten off the crowd.

4:53In 1986, I was a young reporter covering the four-day uprising. They called it the People Power Revolution. I was there when the Marcoses fled and the crowd surged to the presidential palace. I was swept along, entering the family's most private spaces. Imelda's closet with the soon-to-be-famous thousand-plus pairs of shoes, the bedroom with the ailing Ferdinand's dialysis machine, the ornate boudoir with gallon-sized bottles of perfume. They poured through the gates without resistance into a palace which they regard as the equivalent of Hitler's bunker. Within minutes, Aquino supporters began throwing state papers from the palace's windows.

5:41Many who heard the news of the Marcos' departure wept and knelt down to pray. There was dancing in the streets, fireworks, horn honking and laughing, crying, embracing. The long agony is over. We are finally free, and we can be truly proud of the unprecedented way we achieved our freedom.

6:10People power stunned the world. Marcos was America's boy, a bulwark against communism in Asia, a defender of the free world, even if his own country wasn't free. Growing up in Manila, I had no memory of any other president but Marcos. I started elementary school when he was first elected president. He and Imelda were like royalty. I thought they would rule for life. But in 1986, we were sure this is it. Finally, the end of the Marcos era. So Mrs Aquino is now the ruler of this country? We now had a free press, a new constitution, guardrails on the presidency. Across our 7 ,500 islands, local governments were given more power.

7:05What this country is looking forward to, I think, is something which offers them reform, clean government, and perhaps a return to normal civil rights. Yet, four decades later, there's little rejoicing about the freedoms we want. Democracy didn't deliver food to the hungry, nor jobs to the millions out of work. Drive around Manila and you'll see the new enclaves of wealth. They're like mini-Dubais, islands of affluence in a sea of poverty. The uprising, many Filipinos now say, was just rich people's power. Our leaders lived off the public trough, impervious to the people's misery and the precarity of their lives.

7:53This is Tondo in Manila, overcrowded and squalid. Its residents stuck in a social and economic twilight zone, abandoned by the state. The feeling of abandonment never really left a swathe of Filipino voters. And 30 years on from people power, a strongman-style leadership returned to the presidential palace. In 2016, Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand who promised to kill to keep them safe. And then, six years after that, they voted for the deposed dictator's son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr., just what the revolution was designed to prevent. That was in 2022, exactly 50 years after his father declared martial law.

8:49You might say history is repeating itself. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., universally known as Bongbong, won the presidential election. He's the son of the former dictator who ruled for more than 20 years, during which time opposition was crushed and thousands of people were jailed or disappeared. How could this happen in a country that gave the world people power? Those who took part in the uprising now ask, was it worth it? How did Asia's first republic, America's showcase of democracy in the Pacific, end up this way? The fundamental expectation of a Philippine president is to maintain order. Manuel Quezon III is a presidential historian and columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

9:38He's also the grandson of the Philippines' second president, from whom he takes his name. If you trace the popularity or lack of it of any president since the 1980s, it has been on that fundamental question. What we needed in the Philippines was something like an enlightened dictatorship. In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president for the first time. He was voted on the promise that he would fight corruption and restore law and order. Marcos had fought his way to the top. A lawyer and self-described World War II hero, he was first elected to represent the rural province of Ilocos Norte. The Manila elite looked down on him as a provincial wannabe, but he spoke to the frustrations of men like my father.

10:33My father, too, was a lawyer from a nowhere town in the Ilocos region. They were people who were made members of a rising middle class, so imbued with the upwardly mobile aspirations of a middle class and the frustrations of a class held back simply because they lacked the pedigree. And that therefore, Marcos, I think, by his own life experience, was able to communicate to his generation that, hey, I understand you. An uncle of mine who was his contemporary told me the perfect story. This was in 1949. Marcos is about to enter politics. He's invited to a swimming party of his generation of up-and-coming leaders.

11:22And they're all there in their swimming trunks. And he shows up in a white sharkskin suit with patent leather white shoes. And everyone laughed him out of the room. The punchline, my uncle said, is that nine out of ten of the people in that gathering ended up in exile or jail. The Philippines was America's first democracy-building project, long before Iraq or Afghanistan. U.S. troops invaded my country in 1898. They fought a brutal war against Filipino rebels demanding independence from more than 300 years of Spanish rule. What followed was a half century of American tutelage designed to remake the Philippines in America's image.

12:07Marcos belonged to the last generation of young professionals who reached maturity under the American period. They did so right on the eve of the Japanese occupation. So you could say that Marcos belonged to that sort of chameleon generation of Filipinos who had it down pat when it came to verbalizing everything that the Americans wanted to hear, but who understood that the reality on the ground is far different from what the official platitudes are. Marcos was cunning. He understood that in a country that had been a U.S. colony, whose people had been labeled little brown brothers by American officials, any leader had to speak the language of their big brother.

13:01He was a member of a particular subset of Philippine society that had a lot of resentments against the pre-war and the post-war status quo. He knew what everyone's price was. I think that is what set him apart from all his contemporaries. By the time Marcos won a second presidential term in 1969, the country was in crisis. He had raided the treasury to fund his campaign. There was massive boat buying and rampant fraud. The poor in the countryside were restive, and in Manila, students were storming the presidential palace. It was then that young radicals teamed up with the remnants of a 1950s communist peasant rebellion and formed the New People's Army.

13:52In August 1971, two grenades exploded on the stage where the opposition was holding a political rally. Nine were killed, nearly a hundred wounded, including several senators. The middle class feared chaos. Many craved order. My father kept a shotgun near his bed, and he joined neighbors in nighttime patrols in our suburban village. Marcos declared an emergency and laid the groundwork for martial law, which he imposed a year later. We had our back to the wall, as it were. More than this was the atmosphere of despair here in Manila and the surrounding areas because of the continuous bombing and violence.

14:46Manila, the Philippine capital, has always been known for its enjoyable nightlife. But whether these swingers are enjoying themselves or not, they won't be allowed to leave for another three hours, when the curfew is lifted at 4am. These stay-in nightclubs, as they're called, are a curious result of that night in 1972, when martial law was swiftly and efficiently imposed.

15:11On that day, the elected Congress was suspended. Its members were locked out of the legislative chamber, except for a few who were locked up, like Senator Aquino, who's still in jail. Television and radio stations were taken off the air and newspapers closed down. The old society of violence, corruption and pork-barrel politics, said President Marcos, was dead. In its place, a new society would arise. A society built on discipline, where cleanliness and order and honesty would prevail.

15:48Martial law arrived in silence. There were no newspapers that day, nothing on TV except the martial law announcement. I remember the midnight curfew, the barbed wire barricades, the hushed streets. Activists disappeared in the night. 50 ,000 were arrested in the first three years. Reports by Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists confirmed the horrors attested to by those who survived them. So I was captured and then I was tortured and interrogated for about three or four weeks. Then incarcerated in the detention center for more than a year. We were overcrowded. We had a single cell, good only for about 10 people.

16:40There were about 30 of us there. Amado Mendoza is a retired professor of political science and international studies at the University of the Philippines. During the martial law years, he was in the underground resistance to the dictatorship. One of the things that they do is really to torture you psychologically. The less sophisticated ones resorted to physical pain. They have this method of using family-sized soda bottles and they would just continue tapping and tapping. Before you know it, it's black and blue. when they fail to achieve their objectives. They will use rattan sticks to beat you up.

17:33Not many of us knew then that torture and disappearances ensured the regime's survival. We were distracted by the celebrities First Lady Imelda Marcos brought to the country. Margot Fontaine, Muhammad Ali, Brooke Shields, amongst many, many others. Imelda staged spectacles that sought to rival even that put on by real royals. She was wanting to be Faradiba. So whatever she saw in the International Band of Brothers of Dictators, she would try to get her own version. At this time, Marian Roses was working as a curator at Imelda's Cultural Center of the Philippines. Adjoining it was the Folk Arts Theater, built in 1974 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

18:26A grand parade, 20 ,000 people inaugurated the building, inspired by a similar spectacle mounted by Faradiva Pahlavi, the last empress of Iran. And so the structure of the spectacle was evolution from ancient history to the glorious days of modernity embodied by the Shah of Iran in the case of Iran. In the Philippines, the new society of Ferdinand Marcos was the high point of evolution. And we really mustn't forget that this was global. These wonderful women and these macho dictators, they were friends. Imelda was the other half of what a former Marcos propagandist called the conjugal dictatorship.

19:23Imelda Marcos was appointed governor of Manila and minister of human settlements, with millions of dollars of foreign aid at her disposal. She developed a notoriously extravagant lifestyle, and she and other members of the regime amassed huge personal fortunes. As the Philippines' top anti-graft court found, Marcos and his cronies stole money from Japanese war reparations. When that ended and turned into foreign development assistance, the bribery simply continued, prompting Japan to change its aid rules years later. Philippine government auditors also found that Marcos siphoned off U.S. military aid.

20:06The couple mired the Philippines in debt with the help of the World Bank and the IMF. Their enablers spanned the globe. American lawyers, Manhattan realtors, Swiss bankers, and Japanese executives who helped them loot the country and hide their wealth over the course of their 21-year rule. When the revolutionary government started tracing their loot, the Marxists were estimated to have amassed up to$10 billion in 1980s U.S. dollars. That's around 28 billion today.

20:45I'm Ruben Carranza. I am a senior expert at a non-government organization called the International Center for Transitional Justice, ICTJ, which deals with corrupt dictators, war criminals, and corrupt war criminals are also dictators. This is Fulton Street. Ruben took me on a tour of Imelda's New York. During the martial law years, she lived the life of a Manhattan socialite. The First Lady shopped at Tiffany's, partied at Studio 54, and hung out with the likes of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Once martial law ended, Imelda had the keys to several skyscrapers, like 40 Wall Street, where our tour started.

21:30So four buildings were gifted from 1981 to 1982 by Ferdinand to Imelda Marcos. This was one of them, acquired for about$70 million in December 1982. And of course, titled in the name of a Caribbean holding company, which is one shareholder. The$70 million came from different sources, both Philippine money as well as money that came from other borrowings by the Marcoses, but ultimately secured with assets acquired with Philippine money. One other way that they obtained capital to buy these buildings was to literally withdraw money from the branch of the Philippine National Bank here in New York.

22:23According to one testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, she wanted to pull the same$70 million it cost to get it later from this building and buy something else. So it was an investment for her as well, these buildings. Under aliases, Ferdinand and Imelda became regular customers of some of the world's largest banks. And they knowingly accepted Marcos money in Switzerland and then used that as a security for the Marcos-created holding companies created in Panama, in the Caribbean, in offshore accounts. And so these banks knowingly participated in the process of lending to these dummy corporations so that they could acquire real estate here and allowed that to keep going for decades, knowing what was going on with the Marcoses.

23:20While Imelda was shopping and partying, Filipinos were going hungry. In 1982 or 1981, for example, the sugar industry had collapsed. There was malnutrition in the central Philippines. Children were dying because sugarcane farmer families could not feed them. So the Philippine debt in 1982 was approximately$26 billion. Can you imagine? Your country owes$26 billion to foreign creditors, but you decide to buy a$70 million building that same year. You're listening to the documentary, and this is Rewriting a Revolution, from the BBC World Service.

24:03What happens when a mandate becomes a breakthrough? I'm Nishita Henry, special host of Resilient Edge, a business vitality podcast paid and presented by Deloitte. I sat down with two leaders who are redefining what enterprise transformation looks like. Jerry Hoberman from Deloitte and Sarah Oligood from AWS took me behind the scenes on how manufacturing, government, and global enterprises are evolving through major systems change. What excites me is when we have these breakthrough moments that this stuff doesn't happen by accident. The triad of AWS, of Deloitte, of SAP, being able to understand the value proposition that people seek, being able to architect that, and then actually to define a roadmap to progressively achieve the goal really is what makes these successful.

24:50Getting your humans to change the way they're interacting with their technology, the way that they're following the processes, or just that they're reinventing altogether and we're going to completely throw something out is very challenging. Here's what stood out. The 2027 SAP deadline isn't a compliance problem. It's a strategic reset, a chance to rethink how value is created. If your vision is across a 10-year horizon, your ROI is going to be different than if your vision is across a one - or two-year horizon. So how do you move decades of systems and data without slowing the business down? And how do you simplify operations while preparing for what comes next?

25:28From legacy systems to AI-ready infrastructure, the full conversation reveals how Deloitte, AWS, and SAP help organizations reduce risk and unlock continuous innovation. All of that and more on this special episode of Resilient Edge. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

25:48Coco, guess what time it is? Time for season six. Time for season six. I'm Damilanta Kombo and that's my daughter Coco, the inspiration for my award-winning podcast, Dear Daughter, from the BBC World Service. And we're back. I'll be speaking to some amazing people as I collect your letters telling your stories. Dear daughter, being your mum has taught me so much about myself. And giving advice to people everywhere. I want them to be able to take the space that I know that they should have. And I would love to give them the complete agency to do that. Search for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

26:32Dear Daughter.

26:38You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. This is Rewriting a Revolution, and I'm Sheila Coronel, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York. U.S. President Reagan's support only emboldened the Marcoses. Washington believed only Marcos could assure continued access to U.S. bases in the Philippines, which were among the largest U.S. military installations in the world. In 1981, Marcos lifted martial law to appease the opposition and the liberals in the U.S. government. But he continued to have decree-making powers. Presidential historian and journalist Manuel Quezon III.

27:23By the time he had his third inaugural in 1981, he was completely unchallenged and everyone had been whipped. Then came the great miscalculation. He won another term, but what remained of his government's credibility was crippled in 1983, when Benigno Aquino, the opposition leader, was assassinated within minutes of his return from exile in the United States. Marcos associates were widely held to be responsible. The murder brought together most of the previously disparate forces opposed to the regime. Two million marched in Aquino's funeral. I was there, standing shoulder to shoulder with the multitudes.