Cardinal Sin and the Bandit Radio

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Manila, the Philippines.

The 22nd of February, 1986.

A party.

Plates piled high with pineapple, rice, and stew.

Coconut juice served in bowls.

Balloons in an array of neon colours line the ceiling.

Quite the spectacle.

There were strobe lights, there was a big silver ball.

It was in our neighborhood.

Jean Encinas Franco is a professor at the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines.

Back then, she was just 16.

We were really enjoying ourselves, enjoying 80s music from Duran Duran, of course,

Spando Bally.

It was a new wave of British music at that time.

Teenagers giggled as they spun each other round to the pop music.

Suddenly, it stopped.

Instead, the sound of a man's voice came over the radio.

My dear people,

I wish you to pray

because

it's only through prayer that we may solve this problem.

The voice was distinctive.

It was

a kind and nice voice, but very authoritative.

The voice called listeners to go on a dangerous mission to make their way to a major highway known generally as ETSA.

The lights came up.

And then suddenly the parents of the house house where we were having the party had to ask us to leave.

I went to the ENSA Highway against the wishes of my parents.

A small act of teenage rebellion or something more.

This is Cardinal Sin speaking to the people,

especially in Metro Manila.

It's hard to ignore the rallying cry of an archbishop calling you to protest for your country's freedom.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and I want to tell you about Cardinal Jaime Sin.

Yes, he really was called Cardinal Sin.

He risked his reputation and his safety to speak truth to power and to mobilize his church against tyranny.

A day earlier, the 21st of February, 1986, Plaza Roma in Intramuros, the walled city in the historic center of Manila.

Cardinal Jaime Sin waved and said good morning to all he saw as he walked across the plaza towards the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

A kind of short, round, portly, jolly person, his humor, his laughter made him approachable, made him someone that people could relate to.

As the most prominent figure in the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines for the last 12 years, Cardinal Sin was no stranger to difficult political situations, but now the city was riven by protests.

People refused to work or withheld payments to public services.

Opposition members of parliament quit.

Life under the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos had become too much for many to bear.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International were releasing reports saying there was widespread torture, that anyone who spoke in opposition to the political leadership was subject to arrest, that there were infringements on civil liberties.

There were priests and renuts who were reporting the human rights abuses.

Local religious groups were targeted because of their commitment to the poor.

Sharon Erickson Nepstad is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, in the United States.

That week, Marcos was officially declared the winner of that month's snap election.

Local people were furious.

They went on strike and boycotted anything owned by Marcos.

Cardinal Sin shared their anger and supported their protests.

Inside Manila Cathedral, he thought back over his life as a clergyman.

Jaime Sin was born in 1928 in New Washington, in the Philippine province of Aklan.

His family was relatively wealthy, and he was one of 16 children.

A son of Chinese immigrants, his mother had hoped that he would be a priest.

Age 12, he enrolled at a local seminary, but he suffered from various health conditions, notably asthma.

Though he continued to pursue his vocation as he grew up, he wasn't sure he'd be fit enough to serve the church.

In his mid-20s, he prayed to God for help.

If I don't have another asthma attack, then I'll see this as my path into the priesthood.

But if I'm suffering from it, then that's God's sign that he doesn't need my help.

He never suffered an asthma attack again.

So seeing that as a sign that this was his calling in life.

In 1954, he was ordained as a priest.

He devoted himself to outreach to mountain parishes and traveled around on horseback to visit far-flung parishioners.

He already had a reputation as an energetic and dedicated priest when in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos was elected President of the Philippines.

In his first term, he had support.

He had a vision to try to change the economy of the Philippines.

Marcos invested heavily in infrastructure.

That was popular.

But he financed it by taking on more and more loans from abroad.

That was a disaster, producing economic instability that would blight the Philippines for decades.

What's more, Marcos made the unpopular decision to support the United States war in Vietnam, sending Filipino soldiers to lend help to American troops.

Muslim separatists began a guerrilla war in the south of the Philippines.

Jaime Sin was now a bishop and noticed that Marcos' popularity began to fall among his congregation.

When the president ran for re-election in 1969, though, he won again.

There was widespread nepotism and corruption.

He was using his position as the president of the country to enrich himself and to enrich his family.

A lot of public attention focused on the president's glamorous wife, Imelda.

Imelda Marcos purportedly had hundreds of pairs of shoes.

You know, she lived this extravagant lifestyle.

And in a country where the majority of people are impoverished, living under the poverty line.

Many Filipinos were outraged by the corruption.

And people began to protest against him.

And as they protested against him, he cracked down pretty brutally.

In 1972, Marcos abandoned his pretense at democracy, suspended civil liberties, and introduced martial law.

He claimed the military was working to stop the guerrilla war and fight communist insurgents.

Many media outlets, television networks, radio stations and national newspapers were shut down.

Jaime Sin knew Marcos's martial law was consolidating him as a dictator.

The declaration of martial law made it riskier to protest, but it also incited more protests because people recognized that there was a turn towards authoritarianism.

To keep himself in power, Marcos changed the constitution itself.

Due to term limits, he was supposed to step down, but decided to make a constitutional amendment that would allow him to run for a third term.

Committed activists in the Philippines, as well as Filipinos in exile and the diaspora, worked tirelessly to expose Marcos's human rights violations and ill-gotten wealth.

But much of the world, notably the United States government, which was concerned about the growth of communism in Southeast Asia, did not act.

At the beginning of 1974, Jaime Sin became the Archbishop of Manila, but an even greater honor awaited.

The Pope made him the youngest member of the College of Cardinals, one of few from developing countries.

This led to his new form of address, Cardinal Sin, an unavoidable pun on the term Cardinal Sin referring to one of the seven deadly sins in Christianity.

Filipinos found plenty of amusement in his name, and so did he.

His problem with the Marcoses, though, was a growing list of political, social, and financial sins.

Tens of thousands of Filipinos were arrested by the regime.

Thousands were tortured, killed, or disappeared.

Corruption was rampant.

Despite his reservations, Cardinal Sin said Mass at the Presidential Palace.

He was criticized for this, but said, if I don't attend to their spiritual needs, who will?

At one dinner with the First Family, he was seated between Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

He said afterwards, I felt like Jesus, crucified between two thieves.

Marcos banned him from traveling outside the country.

Martial law was officially lifted in 1981, but in practice, nothing changed.

Cardinal Sinn encouraged activists to use churches.

A place where they can come and organize and talk and develop kind of ideas of resistance and strategies.

He saw himself as the head of a church that was the church of the people, not the Vatican's church, but the people's church.

Marcos's main rival was Beninho Aquino Jr., who was living in exile in the United States.

Aquino knew that to return to the Philippines would be dangerous, but felt he had to face Marcos directly.

Aquino's plane landed back in the Philippines on the 21st of August, 1983.

He was wearing a bulletproof vest, and as he exited the plane and was walking down to the tarmac, he was assassinated.

Before he even got onto the Philippine landing strip, he was shot and killed.

And of course, this sparked outrage.

There was a massive memorial service for him, and

people began to turn against Marcos.

Filipinos hoped that this brazen act might be the end of the dictatorship.

but it was not.

Cardinal Sin spoke out ever more loudly about Marcos' abuse of power.

The Catholic broadcaster Radio Veritas was the only Filipino station to broadcast Aquino's funeral procession.

It spread the word within the Philippines and beyond about the corruption and abuses of the Marcos regime.

Cardinal Sin didn't only draw on Christian texts for inspiration, but on the works of thinkers from other faiths such as Mahatma Gandhi, the Hindu lawyer who campaigned for Indian independence from British rule.

From Gandhi, Cardinal Sin learnt about the concept of non-violent resistance.

Since Aquino's murder, Cardinal Sin had become more interested in the idea of non-violence, facing down tyranny without physically attacking it, daring it to attack you instead.

He was involved with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a cross-denominational Christian organization.

This encouraged him to put his faith into action.

He basically said, there are moral dimensions to our faith that require us in a moment of political immorality to take a stance.

This is the time to act.

Sitting in his office at the Archdiocese of Manila, he waited patiently for his old friend Corazon Aquino, the widow of the murdered opposition leader Beninho Aquino.

The American government was growing irritated with Marcos.

Perhaps hoping to appease von Reagan, the President of the United States, Marcos called another election.

Cardinal Sin encouraged Corazon Aquino to run against the dictator.

Cardinal Sin knew Aquino would never have equal access to the media, but he used his regular radio addresses to help rally Filipinos to her cause.

The fact that his name was Cardinal Sin caught people's attention.

That's unusual.

And he played with that.

He would say, welcome to the House of Sin.

He knew that was funny, and instead of trying to ignore it, he used it.

Many feared the election would not be fair.

The national movement for free elections mobilized more than half a million people as volunteer poll watchers to try to head off the intimidation and fraud seen at previous ballots.

People were saying we're going to trace this election very closely, we're going to monitor, we want this to be a free and fair election.

Many Roman Catholics, including the Pope himself, questioned whether a member of the clergy should be involved in politics, but a movement had begun in Latin America called Liberation Theology.

Rather than concentrating on the afterlife, liberation theology focused spiritual effort on the needs of the poor and fighting injustice in this world, today.

Liberation theology was capturing the attention of some in the Philippines too.

Though Cardinal Sin didn't advocate for liberation theology, he put human dignity at the forefront of church action.

Though Aquino was popular, some Filipinos felt that the election would be corrupt whatever happened, and if they voted, they'd only be helping to legitimize the dictatorship.

Marcos was re-elected.

Afterwards, there were allegations of voting fraud.

30 computer operators, mostly women, walked out of an electronic vote counting center in protest at the corruption they saw.

They gave a press conference in a Manila church before before Cardinal Sin helped them to go into hiding.

As they had documented all of this, it became very clear that Marcos had stolen the election, declared a victory that clearly was not an authentic victory.

Alongside other senior clergy, Cardinal Sin wrote a pastoral letter denouncing the election.

It said, Because it's fraudulent, we will not support Marcos, and we do support the people's right to overthrow him.

And in that same pastoral letter, they said, it is your right, it is your obligation to overthrow a corrupt regime, but you must do it nonviolently.

Corazon Aquino, too, called on the Filipino people to take a non-violent stand.

She said, I have a systematic plan in place with each day taking on a new action.

So she asked people to not show up for work.

She asked people to withhold payments for public services.

She asked people to withhold support from different agencies.

Aquino refused any compromise.

She insisted Marcos had to leave or be removed from office.

But Cardinal Sin knew there was

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The 22nd of February, 1986.

Radio Veritas, Manila.

Cardinal Sin collapsed in his chair, exhausted by the drama unfolding around him.

President Marcos had found out that his defense minister and his vice chief of staff planned to defect from his regime.

They'd called Cardinal Sin to plead for his help.

We are at this military compound in the capital city of Manila, and Marcos knows where we are, and he's going to send out troops to arrest us, and that is a death sentence for us.

We'll be convicted and assassinated for our lack of loyalty.

Cardinal Sin had a choice.

Should he help the defectors and risk his own safety?

Or stay out of politics and focus on the spiritual needs of his flock?

Who could he trust?

This was a difficult decision because this is the same military that for years had been repressing the population.

This is the same military that for years had kept Marcos in power, had arrested his political opponents, were carrying out these orders to torture.

And so it was a gamble to say we're going to side with with the military.

And many people had the legitimate fear that if they got rid of Marcos, they were just going to replace it with a military regime.

Cardinal Sin fiddled with the volume on the sound desk in front of him.

He pulled his headphones tightly over his head and repositioned his glasses.

He prepared to speak on Radio Veritas.

That was the one place that everybody knew to turn in.

That was the one place that was autonomous from the state.

And it was on the radio.

Cardinal Sin called on people to come to stand between the defectors and Marcos's troops.

If any of you could be around

at Camp Aguinaldo to show your solidarity and your support in this very crucial period when our two good friends have shown

their

idealism,

I would be very happy if you could support them now.

I would only wish

that

violence and

bloodshed be avoided.

A crowd of people began to gather on Edza, the highway.

Forces loyal to Marcos stormed Radio Veritas' transmitter north of Manila.

They destroyed the transmitter and all the equipment they could find.

But Cardinal Sin would not be silenced.

He called a friend who managed to fix a transmitter from a defunct radio station.

The new station was called Radio Bandido, Bandit Radio.

It replayed Cardinal Sin's call to action.

When Cardinal Sin said, I want every good Catholic to cut down and take a stand, we see a million people at that location.

Nuns hid Corazon Aquino in a convent, while other clergy set about detailed plans.

They knew we got to organize this.

If people are here, we need to have food.

We need to be at the forefront.

We need to be the ones talking to the soldiers.

When pro-Marcos forces came to find the radio station's staff, Cardinal Sinn called in more nuns.

They sat blocking the spiral staircase leading up to the radio tower and prayed no one would come to harm.

The 23rd of February, 1986, Edsa

The crowd of protesters forming a human shield around the defectors had swelled to barricade both Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame, the headquarters of the armed forces of the Philippines and of the Philippines National Police.

Jean was one of them.

She left the party when she heard Cardinal Sin's call to protest.

We were looking for someone that we can trust.

And

during that time,

Cardinal Sin was the one person we could trust.

He was a stabilizing force in our democracy.

Literally, God sent, you know

she defied her parents to join in

the streets were filled with people it was like a fiesta atmosphere a cacophony of colors

people were holding banners and placards some people wore yellow because that was the color of Corey Aquino the opponent of Marcos Though they were under threat from President Marcos, the protesters refused to leave the highway.

Because they were in this physical location and they were standing in front of the military base to keep the troops from advancing and arresting these military defectors,

they were easy targets.

They were in a position where they could have shot into the crowd and killed thousands.

Whole families and friends joined together and prayed.

Protesters put flowers down the barrels of soldiers' guns.

We were willing to, you know, risk everything

just for him to get out of the country or to give up his stronghold on power.

People were actually shouting to the soldiers not to kill their fellow Filipinos.

We were giving them flowers and food and everything.

So

I don't know, but we were also scared.

But then it's hard to be scared if you are with

lots of people who also support your cause.

Radio Bandido kept broadcasting.

Across Metro Manila, journalists and ordinary people who were watching reported what was happening in the capital.

And Marco sent out his troops in tanks and the commanding officer said, no, disperse or we will plow through the crowd with these tanks.

And he gave them a specified amount of time for everyone to leave.

When nobody left, it was a very serious risk.

They knew, because of the history of the Philippines, that soldiers often did carry out these orders to repress.

This wasn't just an empty threat.

It was a very real possibility.

And when tanks turned on their engines, I think most people thought this is the moment that they're going to advance.

I saw lots of nuns and priests who were there facing the tanks with their rosaries, with their religious images.

But it was a message that we're not going to attack you, we're welcoming you.

Many nuns coming up and saying, you don't have to do this.

That made a difference.

It's very difficult for a devout Catholic to crush a nun by rolling over her with a tank.

The non-violent resistance shown by the protesters meant some soldiers began to question their loyalty to Marcos.

Those soldiers had to decide what's riskier for me to carry out orders and violate my moral conscience or defect to the people, even though they knew that there was a possibility the crowd would be angry with them.

They knew there was a possibility that they would be arrested by the Marcos regime and themselves then executed for their lack of loyalty.

Nuns stood at the front of the protesters, reaching out to the soldiers' faith.

You're a Catholic, we're Catholics, we have this shared identity.

That's a more important identity than your commitment to the Marcos regime.

And you do not have to follow orders that are in violation of God's moral order.

But despite more and more government and military officials rebelling, Marcos still refused to let go of power.

Three days later, Cardinal Sin clapped enthusiastically as Corazon Aquino was sworn in as President of the Philippines.

As he joined the crowd singing the anti-Marcos anthem Bayan Ko, the Cardinal thought back over the last few days and the movement's success.

The majority of the military defected to the movement.

In fact, they set up defection centers and fed soldiers and welcomed them.

Less than two hours later, the former president Marcos attempted his own inauguration ceremony.

He wanted to go on state television and try to tell people that this situation was under control and they shouldn't support these defectors.

But nobody at the state-run media was willing to use their skills to actually air his recording.

Marcos began his broadcast with his family around him.

A few miles from his his studio, though, military rebels and a few thousand civilians took control of the government television station.

Just as Marcos was telling his troops to fire on the rebels, the broadcast switch was flipped off and he disappeared from the air.

And he couldn't get his military to carry out orders.

He had no power left, and so at that point, he boarded a plane and left and actually came to the United States and lived out the rest of his life in exile.

Just days after Cardinal Sin's appeal, the Filipino people peacefully toppled a dictatorship without firing a shot.

Cardinal Sin planned to build a shrine at Edza.

While his role in overthrowing Marcos was widely admired, there was criticism of some of his positions on other matters.

People critique him for his stances.

Evidently, he was opposed to birth control.

Even though people didn't necessarily agree with all of his stances, he was very human and people could relate to him and people people could see his humanity and he wasn't turned into a saint.

His role in the People's Power Revolution, commonly known as EDSA I, is part of what's commemorated annually at monuments built along EDSA.

Many people saw this as an example of a new kind of religious leadership.

We can't look at these heroes in isolation.

Other people might take the same choices and not have the same outcomes, but that moral courage is really important.

And when it's combined with the right structural conditions, it's very powerful and can change societies.

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos escaped in American aircraft to Honolulu in Hawaii.

According to United States customs officials, they brought with them crates of valuables, including jewelry and millions of dollars in cash.

It has been alleged that the Marcoses and their acolytes stole up to $10 billion of public money.

Imelda Marcos has said that the charges against her and her family are harassment and persecution.

Freedom in the Philippines has proved more difficult than dealing with one dictatorship.

In 2001, there was a second People's Power Revolution to overthrow President Joseph Estrada.

Once again, Cardinal Sin played a pivotal role, though this was controversial at the time and is still debated today.

The current President of the Philippines, elected by a landslide in 2022, is Bong Bong Marcos, the only son of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Not everyone in the Philippines admires Cardinal Sin and Ed Sawan.

But for every Filipino, especially Filipino older than me or my age, it's a symbol of freedom.

It's a symbol of resistance to the 20 years of Marcos' rule.

The feeling that you're holding the government accountable gives you an adrenaline rush and a sense of responsibility as a citizen.

Next time on History's Heroes, the woman who created the international charity Save the Children,

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