Benigno Aquino Jr.

Benigno Simeon Aquino Jr. was born on November 27, 1932, in Concepcion, a farming town in the province of Tarlac on the central plain of Luzon ^[1]. The family he entered was already steeped in Philippine politics. His grandfather, Servillano Aquino, had been a general in the revolutionary army of Emilio Aguinaldo during the fight against Spain and later the United States. His father, Benigno Aquino Sr., served as a legislator and held a cabinet post in the Japanese-sponsored government of Jose Laurel during the Second World War, a role that brought the family both influence and controversy ^[2].

The younger Aquino, known throughout his life by the nickname Ninoy, grew up between the family hacienda in Tarlac and schools in Manila. He studied at De La Salle College and Ateneo de Manila before enrolling in law at the University of the Philippines, where one of his fraternity brothers was a young Ferdinand Marcos ^[2]. He never finished the law degree. Journalism pulled him away first, and politics soon after.

At seventeen he talked his way into a job as a correspondent for The Manila Times, and the paper sent him to cover the Korean War ^[1]. He filed dispatches from the front while still a teenager, an assignment that made his name in Manila and earned him a Philippine Legion of Honor award on his return. Reporting later took him to Indochina and other parts of Southeast Asia, and the contacts he built there shaped his early career in government.

Aquino's rise through elective office was unusually fast, and speed became part of his legend. In 1955, at twenty two, he was elected mayor of his hometown of Concepcion, among the youngest mayors in the country ^[1]. Before that, President Ramon Magsaysay had used him as a personal emissary to Luis Taruc, the commander of the communist-led Huk rebellion in central Luzon. Aquino's negotiations contributed to Taruc's surrender in 1954, a coup for a man barely out of his teens ^[3].

Higher offices followed at the same clip. He became vice governor of Tarlac in 1959 and governor of the province in 1961, then served as secretary general of the Liberal Party ^[1]. In 1967 he won a seat in the Senate at the age of thirty four, the only Liberal candidate to survive a sweep by the Nacionalista Party of President Ferdinand Marcos. He was the youngest senator elected in the postwar Philippines ^[2].

In the Senate, Aquino built a reputation as the sharpest critic of the Marcos administration. He attacked what he described as an increasingly militarized and lavish government, and in a famous 1968 speech he denounced the spending behind the new Cultural Center of the Philippines. He also helped expose the Jabidah affair of 1968, in which Muslim army recruits were alleged to have been killed by their trainers on Corregidor Island, a scandal that damaged the administration and fed unrest in Mindanao ^[3]. By the end of the decade, surveys and press coverage treated Aquino as the likely opposition candidate for president in the election scheduled for 1973.

That election never took place. On September 21, 1972, Marcos signed Proclamation 1081 placing the entire Philippines under martial law, and Aquino was among the first opposition figures arrested when the order was enforced ^[4]. He was charged before a military tribunal with murder, subversion, and illegal possession of firearms. Aquino rejected the tribunal's authority, arguing that a civilian could not receive a fair trial from judges who answered to the man he had opposed.

His imprisonment stretched to seven years and seven months, much of it at Fort Bonifacio. In April 1975 he went on a hunger strike for forty days to protest the proceedings against him, ending it only when he was near death ^[2]. In November 1977 the military commission sentenced him to death by firing squad. The sentence drew protests from foreign governments and human rights groups, and Marcos, wary of creating a martyr, never carried it out ^[4].

Even behind bars Aquino remained a political force. From his cell he ran as a candidate of the opposition group Lakas ng Bayan, known as LABAN, in the 1978 parliamentary elections for Metro Manila. The campaign included a noise barrage in which residents across the capital banged pots and honked horns in support on the eve of the vote. The government declared a complete sweep for the Marcos slate, a result the opposition denounced as fraudulent ^[3].

In 1954 Aquino married Corazon Cojuangco, the quiet, convent-educated daughter of a wealthy Tarlac landowning family whose holdings included the vast Hacienda Luisita sugar estate ^[5]. The couple had five children: Maria Elena, Aurora Corazon, Benigno III, Victoria Elisa, and Kristina Bernadette. Their only son, Benigno Aquino III, would be elected president of the Philippines in 2010, and their youngest daughter Kris became one of the country's best known television personalities ^[5].

Friends and rivals alike described Ninoy as restless, fast-talking, and theatrical, a man who loved an audience and rarely stopped working a room. Corazon, by contrast, avoided the spotlight for most of their marriage, raising the children while her husband campaigned. The years of imprisonment tested and deepened the family's Catholic faith. Aquino wrote that solitary confinement stripped away his ambitions and led him to a religious conversion, a theme he returned to often in later speeches and letters ^[2].

In 1980, after Aquino suffered a heart attack in prison, the Marcos government permitted him to travel to the United States for coronary bypass surgery ^[1]. He recovered in Texas and then settled with his family in the Boston area, where he accepted fellowships at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent the exile writing, lecturing, and meeting other Filipino oppositionists, always insisting that his absence from the Philippines was temporary.

By 1983 Marcos was visibly ill with lupus, the Philippine economy was deteriorating, and Aquino decided the moment had come to go home and press for a peaceful transition. Friends, family, and even Imelda Marcos warned him that his life would be in danger. He answered that the Filipino, in his words, was worth dying for, and boarded a series of flights from Boston through Los Angeles, Singapore, and Taipei under the alias Marcial Bonifacio, a name that joked about martial law and his Fort Bonifacio cell ^[4].

On August 21, 1983, China Airlines Flight 811 landed at Manila International Airport. Soldiers boarded the plane and escorted Aquino out through a side door onto the service stairs. Seconds later he was shot in the head and fell dead on the tarmac. A second body, that of Rolando Galman, lay nearby; the military immediately identified Galman as the lone assassin and said troops had killed him on the spot ^[6].

Almost no one believed the official story. An investigating board chaired by jurist Corazon Agrava rejected the lone gunman account in 1984 and found that a military conspiracy lay behind the killing ^[6]. A trial under the Marcos government acquitted twenty five soldiers and one civilian in 1985, but after the dictatorship fell the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, and in 1990 the Sandiganbayan court convicted sixteen soldiers of the double murder ^[3]. Who ordered the assassination has never been legally established.

Aquino's funeral on August 31, 1983 drew a procession through Manila estimated in the millions, the largest the country had seen ^[4]. The killing transformed a fractured opposition into a mass movement, drove capital out of the country, and emboldened the press, the Catholic Church, and the business community to confront the regime openly. When Marcos called a snap presidential election for February 1986, the opposition united behind Aquino's widow. Corazon Aquino claimed victory amid massive fraud, and within weeks the civilian-military uprising known as the People Power Revolution, staged largely on the highway called EDSA, forced Marcos into exile and installed her as president ^[5].

The Philippines has woven Aquino's memory into its public landscape. Manila International Airport, where he died, was renamed Ninoy Aquino International Airport in 1987, and his profile appeared for decades on the 500 peso banknote alongside, in later series, that of his wife ^[1]. In 2004 the republic declared August 21 a national holiday, Ninoy Aquino Day ^[7]. Monuments in Makati and across Tarlac mark his life, and the Aquino name remained central to Philippine politics through his son's presidency from 2010 to 2016.

Among the most cited Benigno Aquino Jr. facts is that he never held the presidency he seemed destined for; his influence came instead from sacrifice. Any honest account of Benigno Aquino Jr. achievements must weigh the record-setting offices, the exposure of the Jabidah affair, and the moral example of his return, while a full Benigno Aquino Jr. biography also notes the criticisms: his early closeness to traditional patronage politics and the dynasty his death helped entrench. What is beyond dispute is the consequence of his final act. His death set in motion the restoration of Philippine democracy, and the 1987 Constitution, free elections, and a free press that followed are inseparable from it ^[3].