Who is President Corazon C. Aquino?
Maria Corazon
"Cory" Sumulong Cojuangco-Aquino was the 11th President of the
Republic of the Philippines. Born on January 25, 1933, in Tarlac province, she
became the first woman to hold the office of the president in the country. Her
political journey began after the assassination of her husband, Benigno
"Ninoy" Aquino Jr., in 1983 a pivotal event that catalyzed widespread
opposition to Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian regime.
Aquino’s rise to the
presidency was marked by the EDSA People Power Revolution in 1986, a peaceful
uprising that led to the ousting of Marcos. She emerged as a symbol of
democracy and hope, representing the Filipino people's struggle for freedom and
justice. As president, Cory Aquino focused on restoring democratic
institutions, promoting human rights, and addressing the economic challenges
inherited from the previous administration. One of her major achievements was
the ratification of the 1987 Constitution, which limited presidential powers
and re-established a bicameral Congress. She also launched the Comprehensive
Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), aimed at redistributing agricultural land to
landless farmers.
Despite facing
multiple coup attempts and economic difficulties, Aquino remained steadfast in
her commitment to democracy and social justice. Her legacy marked by integrity,
courage, and dedication to democratic principles continues to inspire many
Filipinos. As Roces (2009) notes in Corazon Aquino: The Story of a Revolution,
Aquino’s presidency not only restored democratic governance but also redefined
the role of women in Philippine politics. She passed away on August 1, 2009,
but her contributions remain a pivotal chapter in the nation’s history.
Speech
of Her Excellency Corazon C. Aquino. President of the Philippines during the
Joint Session of the United States Congress. (Delivered at Washington, D.C., on
September 18, 1986.
Three years ago, I
left America in grief to bury my husband, Ninoy Aquino. I thought I had left it
also to lay to rest his restless dream of Philippine freedom. Today, I have
returned as the president of a free people.
In burying Ninoy, a
whole nation honored him. By that brave and selfless act of giving honor, a
nation in shame recovered its own. A country that had lost faith in its future
found it in a faithless and brazen act of murder. So in giving, we receive, in
losing we find, and out of defeat, we snatched our victory.
For the nation, Ninoy
became the pleasing sacrifice that answered their prayers for freedom. For
myself and our children, Ninoy was a loving husband and father. His loss, three
times in our lives, was always a deep and painful one.
Fourteen years ago
this month was the first time we lost him. A president-turned-dictator, and
traitor to his oath, suspended the Constitution and shut down the Congress that
was much like this one before which I am honored to speak. He detained my
husband along with thousands of others senators, publishers and anyone who had
spoken up for the democracy as its end drew near. But for Ninoy, a long and
cruel ordeal was reserved. The dictator already knew that Ninoy was not a body
merely to be imprisoned but a spirit he must break. For even as the
dictatorship demolished one by one the institutions of democracy the press, the
Congress, the independence of the judiciary, the protection of the Bill of
Rights Ninoy kept their spirit alive in
himself.
The government sought
to break him by indignities and terror. They locked him up in a tiny, nearly
airless cell in a military camp in the north. They stripped him naked and held
the threat of sudden midnight execution over his head. Ninoy held up
manfully–all of it. I barely did as well. For 43 days, the authorities would
not tell me what had happened to him. This was the first time my children and I
felt we had lost him.
When that didn’t work,
they put him on trial for subversion, murder and a host of other crimes before
a military commission. Ninoy challenged its authority and went on a fast. If he
survived it, then, he felt, God intended him for another fate. We had lost him
again. For nothing would hold him back from his determination to see his fast
through to the end. He stopped only when it dawned on him that the government
would keep his body alive after the fast had destroyed his brain. And so, with
barely any life in his body, he called off the fast on the fortieth day. God
meant him for other things, he felt. He did not know that an early death would
still be his fate, that only the timing was wrong.
At any time during his
long ordeal, Ninoy could have made a separate peace with the dictatorship, as
so many of his countrymen had done. But the spirit of democracy that inheres in
our race and animates this chamber could not be allowed to die. He held out, in
the loneliness of his cell and the frustration of exile, the democratic
alternative to the insatiable greed and mindless cruelty of the right and the
purging holocaust of the left.
And then, we lost him,
irrevocably and more painfully than in the past. The news came to us in Boston.
It had to be after the three happiest years of our lives together. But his
death was my country’s resurrection in the courage and faith by which alone
they could be free again. The dictator had called him a nobody. Two million
people threw aside their passivity and escorted him to his grave. And so began
the revolution that has brought me to democracy’s most famous home, the
Congress of the United States.
The task had fallen on
my shoulders to continue offering the democratic alternative to our people.
Archibald Macleish had
said that democracy must be defended by arms when it is attacked by arms and by
truth when it is attacked by lies. He failed to say how it shall be won.
I held fast to Ninoy’s
conviction that it must be by the ways of democracy. I held out for
participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship called, even if I knew it
would be rigged. I was warned by the lawyers of the opposition that I ran the
grave risk of legitimizing the foregone results of elections that were clearly
going to be fraudulent. But I was not fighting for lawyers but for the people
in whose intelligence I had implicit faith. By the exercise of democracy, even
in a dictatorship, they would be prepared for democracy when it came. And then,
also, it was the only way I knew by which we could measure our power even in
the terms dictated by the dictatorship.
The people vindicated
me in an election shamefully marked by government thuggery and fraud. The
opposition swept the elections, garnering a clear majority of the votes, even
if they ended up, thanks to a corrupt Commission on Elections, with barely a
third of the seats in parliament. Now, I knew our power.
Last year, in an
excess of arrogance, the dictatorship called for its doom in a snap election.
The people obliged. With over a million signatures, they drafted me to
challenge the dictatorship. And I obliged them. The rest is the history that
dramatically unfolded on your television screen and across the front pages of
your newspapers.
You saw a nation,
armed with courage and integrity, stand fast by democracy against threats and
corruption. You saw women poll watchers break out in tears as armed goons
crashed the polling places to steal the ballots but, just the same, they tied
themselves to the ballot boxes. You saw a people so committed to the ways of
democracy that they were prepared to give their lives for its pale imitation.
At the end of the day, before another wave of fraud could distort the results,
I announced the people’s victory.
The distinguished
co-chairman of the United States observer team in his report to your President
described that victory:
“I was witness to an
extraordinary manifestation of democracy on the part of the Filipino people.
The ultimate result was the election of Mrs. Corazon C. Aquino as President and
Mr. Salvador Laurel as Vice-President of the Philippines.”
Many of you here today
played a part in changing the policy of your country towards us. We, Filipinos,
thank each of you for what you did: for, balancing America’s strategic interest
against human concerns, illuminates the American vision of the world.
When a subservient
parliament announced my opponent’s victory, the people turned out in the
streets and proclaimed me President. And true to their word, when a handful of
military leaders declared themselves against the dictatorship, the people
rallied to their protection. Surely, the people take care of their own. It is
on that faith and the obligation it entails, that I assumed the presidency.
As I came to power
peacefully, so shall I keep it. That is my contract with my people and my
commitment to God. He had willed that the blood drawn with the lash shall not,
in my country, be paid by blood drawn by the sword but by the tearful joy of
reconciliation.
We have swept away
absolute power by a limited revolution that respected the life and freedom of
every Filipino. Now, we are restoring full constitutional government. Again, as
we restored democracy by the ways of democracy, so are we completing the
constitutional structures of our new democracy under a constitution that
already gives full respect to the Bill of Rights. A jealously independent
Constitutional Commission is completing its draft which will be submitted later
this year to a popular referendum. When it is approved, there will be
congressional elections. So within about a year from a peaceful but national
upheaval that overturned a dictatorship, we shall have returned to full
constitutional government. Given the polarization and breakdown we inherited,
this is no small achievement.
My predecessor set
aside democracy to save it from a communist insurgency that numbered less than
500. Unhampered by respect for human rights, he went at it hammer and tongs. By
the time he fled, that insurgency had grown to more than 16,000. I think there
is a lesson here to be learned about trying to stifle a thing with the means by
which it grows.
I don’t think anybody,
in or outside our country, concerned for a democratic and open Philippines,
doubts what must be done. Through political initiatives and local reintegration
programs, we must seek to bring the insurgents down from the hills and, by
economic progress and justice, show them that for which the best intentioned
among them fight.
As President, I will
not betray the cause of peace by which I came to power. Yet equally, and again
no friend of Filipino democracy will challenge this, I will not stand by and
allow an insurgent leadership to spurn our offer of peace and kill our young
soldiers, and threaten our new freedom.
Yet, I must explore
the path of peace to the utmost for at its end, whatever disappointment I meet
there, is the moral basis for laying down the olive branch of peace and taking
up the sword of war. Still, should it come to that, I will not waver from the
course laid down by your great liberator: “With malice towards none, with
charity for all, with firmness in the rights as God gives us to see the rights,
let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for
him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves
and with all nations.”
Like Lincoln, I
understand that force may be necessary before mercy. Like Lincoln, I don’t
relish it. Yet, I will do whatever it takes to defend the integrity and freedom
of my country.
Finally, may I turn to
that other slavery: our $26 billion foreign debt. I have said that we shall
honor it. Yet must the means by which we shall be able to do so be kept from
us? Many conditions imposed on the previous government that stole this debt
continue to be imposed on us who never benefited from it. And no assistance or
liberality commensurate with the calamity that was visited on us has been
extended. Yet ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever. With little
help from others, we Filipinos fulfilled the first and most difficult
conditions of the debt negotiation the full restoration of democracy and
responsible government. Elsewhere, and in other times of more stringent world
economic conditions, Marshall plans and their like were felt to be necessary
companions of returning democracy.
When I met with
President Reagan yesterday, we began an important dialogue about cooperation
and the strengthening of the friendship between our two countries. That meeting
was both a confirmation and a new beginning and should lead to positive results
in all areas of common concern.
Today, we face the
aspirations of a people who had known so much poverty and massive unemployment
for the past 14 years and yet offered their lives for the abstraction of
democracy. Wherever I went in the campaign, slum area or impoverished village,
they came to me with one cry: democracy! Not food, although they clearly needed
it, but democracy. Not work, although they surely wanted it, but democracy. Not
money, for they gave what little they had to my campaign. They didn’t expect me
to work a miracle that would instantly put food into their mouths, clothes on
their back, education in their children, and work that will put dignity in
their lives. But I feel the pressing obligation to respond quickly as the
leader of a people so deserving of all these things.
We face a communist
insurgency that feeds on economic deterioration, even as we carry a great share
of the free world defenses in the Pacific. These are only two of the many
burdens my people carry even as they try to build a worthy and enduring house
for their new democracy, that may serve as well as a redoubt for freedom in
Asia. Yet, no sooner is one stone laid than two are taken away. Half our export
earnings, $2 billion out of $4 billion, which was all we could earn in the
restrictive markets of the world, went to pay just the interest on a debt whose
benefit the Filipino people never received.
Still, we fought for
honor, and, if only for honor, we shall pay. And yet, should we have to wring
the payments from the sweat of our men’s faces and sink all the wealth piled up
by the bondsman’s two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil?
Yet to all Americans,
as the leader of a proud and free people, I address this question: has there
been a greater test of national commitment to the ideals you hold dear than
that my people have gone through? You have spent many lives and much treasure
to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here you
have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.
Three years ago, I said thank you, America, for the haven from oppression, and the home you gave Ninoy, myself and our children, and for the three happiest years of our lives together. Today, I say, join us, America, as we build a new home for democracy, another haven for the oppressed, so it may stand as a shining testament of our two nation’s commitment to freedom.
References
Aquino, C.
(1986, September 18). Speech before the U.S. Congress. Washington, D.C.
Britannica.
(2025, July 28). Corazon Aquino. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Corazon-Aquino
Escobar, M.
(2018, January 25). Revisit Cory Aquino’s historic 1986 speech before the U.S.
Congress. Esquire Philippines. https://www.esquiremag.ph/politics/news/revisit-cory-aquino-s-historic-1986-speech-before-the-us-congress-a00207-20180125
Macaraeg, P.
(2020, September 21). How Martial Law impacted the economy. Esquire
Philippines. [Article title inferred; URL not provided]
McCoy, A. W.
(1980). Yankee imperialism and Philippine nationalism: A study of the
American press cartoons of the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902. Solida.
Nowak, T. C.
(1977). The Philippines before Martial Law: A study in politics and administration.
American Political Science Review, 71(2), 522–539. https://doi.org/10.2307/1978346
Sinaunang
Panahon. (n.d.). The impact of Martial Law on the Philippine economy.
Historical overview. [Publisher and URL missing]
Wikimedia
Foundation. (2025). Corazon Aquino. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corazon_Aquino?form=MG0AV3
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