Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has abolished the holiday marking the anniversary of the revolution that ousted his dictator father from power in 1986, according to an official document released Friday.
The president’s text announcing the 2024 holidays, dated October 11 but released on Friday, does not mention February 25. On this day in 1986, dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family fled the presidential palace, the height of the People Power Revolution.
February 25 was declared a “special holiday” by President Joseph Estrada in 2000. Human rights activists typically hold rallies on this day to commemorate the restoration of democracy and the end of the Marcos dictatorship, seen as a period of abuse and corruption that impoverished the country.
His son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president in 2022 after a massive disinformation campaign on social media that sought to portray his family’s history in a positive light.
He did not cancel this holiday for 2023, but moved it to the day before, February 24th, which fell on a Friday. He sent a wreath of flowers to the “Power to the People” monument and spoke in a press release of a “time of suffering” by encouraging “reconciliation with those who think differently.”
Karapatan, an alliance of human rights groups in the Philippines, said the abolition of the holiday shows the Marcos government’s disregard for “meaningful social policies that seek justice, truth and accountability.”
“It is a blatant distortion of history by diminishing or even erasing any evidence that the Filipino people overthrew the Marcos dictatorship and rejected its negative impact on the nation,” said Cristina Palabay, secretary general of Karapatan.
The Gunita Project, which digitizes books, films and articles documenting the Marcos Sr. regime, called it another “state-sponsored attempt to whitewash the dictatorship’s brutal history.”
However, the list of holidays also includes August 21, which commemorates the 1983 assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who, along with his wife, former President Corazon Aquino, was revered for leading the fight for the restoration of the to have led democracy in the archipelago.