Corazon Aquino

Maria Corazon Sumulong Cojuangco was born on January 25, 1933, in Paniqui, a town in Tarlac province on the Philippine island of Luzon. Her family, the Cojuangcos, ranked among the wealthiest landowning clans in the country, with holdings built on sugar plantations, banking, and politics. Her father, Jose Cojuangco, served in the Philippine legislature, and her mother, Demetria Sumulong, came from a prominent political family in Rizal province ^[1].

The sixth of eight children, she was educated first at private schools in Manila. In 1946, shortly after the end of the Second World War, her parents sent her to the United States to continue her studies. She attended Ravenhill Academy in Philadelphia and Notre Dame Convent School in New York before enrolling at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, where she earned a degree in French and mathematics in 1953 ^[2]. Her Catholic schooling left a permanent mark; throughout her life she described her faith as the anchor of her decisions.

Back in Manila she began studying law at Far Eastern University, but she left after one year. In 1954 she married Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr., an ambitious young journalist from a rival Tarlac political family. The couple had five children: four daughters and a son, Benigno III, who would himself become president decades later ^[1].

For most of her married life, Corazon Aquino stayed deliberately out of public view while her husband's career accelerated. Ninoy Aquino became mayor of Concepcion, then governor of Tarlac, and in 1967 the youngest senator ever elected in the Philippines. He emerged as the sharpest critic of President Ferdinand Marcos, and many expected him to win the presidency in 1973 ^[3].

That election never took place. Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, shut down Congress, and had Ninoy arrested on charges of murder and subversion. He spent more than seven years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, while his wife raised their children and carried his messages to allies and journalists. She later said those years transformed her from a sheltered political spouse into someone who understood suffering and endurance ^[2]. In 1980, after Ninoy suffered a heart attack, Marcos allowed the family to leave for the United States, where they lived quietly in Massachusetts while Ninoy held fellowships at Harvard and MIT.

On August 21, 1983, Ninoy Aquino flew home to Manila to challenge the regime and was shot dead on the airport tarmac moments after leaving the plane, while in military custody ^[3]. The assassination shocked the country. His funeral drew an enormous procession through Manila, and his widow, returning to bury him, found herself the emotional center of a swelling opposition movement she had never sought to lead ^[4].

Late in 1985, Marcos, under pressure at home and from Washington, called a snap presidential election for February 7, 1986. Opposition leaders needed a candidate who could unite their fractious ranks, and a petition drive gathered more than a million signatures urging Aquino to run. She agreed after a period of prayer and reflection, and the veteran politician Salvador Laurel joined the ticket as her running mate ^[4].

Marcos mocked her inexperience, saying a woman belonged in the bedroom, not in politics. Aquino turned the attack around, telling crowds that she had no experience in cheating, stealing, or lying. The campaign drew vast rallies dressed in yellow, the color adopted by her movement. When the official count declared Marcos the winner amid documented fraud, computer technicians tabulating results walked out in protest, and independent poll watchers from the group NAMFREL reported that Aquino had actually won ^[3].

The crisis broke on February 22, 1986, when Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and General Fidel Ramos defected and barricaded themselves in military camps along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, known as EDSA. Cardinal Jaime Sin appealed over Catholic radio for citizens to protect the rebels, and hundreds of thousands of unarmed Filipinos filled the highway, blocking tanks with rosaries, food, and their own bodies. After four days, Marcos fled to Hawaii aboard American aircraft. Aquino took the presidential oath on February 25, 1986, becoming the eleventh president of the Philippines and the first woman in the office ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Corazon Aquino usually begins with the revolution, but her most durable work came afterward, in the slow rebuilding of institutions that Marcos had hollowed out. Governing under a temporary Freedom Constitution, she appointed a commission to draft a new charter. Voters ratified the 1987 Constitution by an overwhelming margin in a February plebiscite. The document restored the bicameral Congress, limited presidents to a single six-year term, curbed the power to declare martial law, and created new commissions on human rights and good governance ^[5].

Her government released political prisoners, restored the writ of habeas corpus, dismantled censorship, and opened negotiations with communist and Muslim insurgencies. The Presidential Commission on Good Government pursued the estimated billions of dollars that Marcos and his associates had moved abroad, a legal effort that continued for decades ^[6]. In 1988 she signed the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law, a land redistribution program that critics found riddled with exemptions, including provisions that allowed her own family to keep effective control of the vast Hacienda Luisita estate through a stock distribution scheme ^[6].

Any honest account of Corazon Aquino achievements has to weigh them against constant instability. Her presidency survived at least seven coup attempts by disaffected military factions, the most serious in August 1987 and December 1989; the latter required American air support and left dozens dead ^[4]. The economy grew early in her term but was battered by power shortages, a catastrophic 1990 earthquake in Luzon, and the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. In September 1991 the Philippine Senate voted to reject a new treaty for American bases, ending nearly a century of United States military presence at Subic Bay and Clark, a decision reached during her watch ^[5].

Aquino never separated her public role from her private devotion. A daily Mass-goer who consulted her conscience and her rosary before major decisions, she framed the fight against dictatorship in explicitly moral terms and worked closely with the Catholic hierarchy, especially Cardinal Sin ^[2]. She refused to live in Malacanang Palace itself, working instead from the nearby Guest House and opening the main palace to the public as a museum of the Marcos years, complete with Imelda Marcos's famous shoe collection.

Her family remained at the center of her life. She raised five children, and the household absorbed the strain of prison years, exile, and assassination. Kris Aquino, the youngest, became one of the country's best known television personalities, while Benigno Aquino III entered Congress in 1998. Observers often noted the contrast between her personal modesty, her plain yellow dresses and self-deprecating humor, and the enormous crowds she could summon ^[1].

Wealth complicated the image. The Cojuangco fortune, and above all Hacienda Luisita, exposed her to the charge that a member of the landed elite could never fully deliver agrarian reform. A violent 2004 strike at the hacienda, in which several protesters were killed after her presidency, kept the controversy alive into her final years ^[6].

Aquino declined to seek reelection, arguing that the constitution's single-term limit applied to her in spirit even though lawyers disagreed, and she endorsed Fidel Ramos, the general who had defended her government. When Ramos won the May 1992 election, she rode home from the inauguration in a simple Toyota rather than the presidential limousine, a gesture meant to mark the first peaceful transfer of power in the Philippines since 1965 ^[4].

Retirement did not mean silence. She campaigned against attempts to amend the constitution in ways she saw as self-serving for incumbents. In January 2001 she joined the crowds of the second EDSA uprising that forced President Joseph Estrada from office over corruption charges. Later she publicly called on President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to resign amid vote-rigging allegations, and she apologized to Estrada for having helped remove him once she concluded that the successor government had behaved worse ^[7]. She also devoted time to microfinance projects, charitable foundations, and painting, a hobby she took up seriously in her final decade.

In March 2008 her family announced that she had colon cancer. Filipinos organized prayer vigils and yellow ribbon campaigns as her condition worsened. She died in Manila on August 1, 2009, at the age of 76. Her funeral procession drew hundreds of thousands of mourners in scenes that recalled her husband's burial twenty-six years earlier, and she was interred beside him at Manila Memorial Park ^[7].

Time magazine named Aquino its Woman of the Year for 1986, and international observers ranked the People Power Revolution among the most consequential nonviolent movements of the century, a model cited by demonstrators from Seoul to Eastern Europe in the years that followed ^[8]. She received the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding in 1996, among many honors recognizing her role in restoring Philippine democracy ^[2].

At home the verdict is warmer but more contested. Admirers credit her with rebuilding courts, Congress, a free press, and the habit of elections after fourteen years of one-man rule. Critics answer that she restored the old elite families along with democracy, that land reform stalled at her family's own gate, and that poverty and insurgency outlasted her good intentions ^[6]. Both readings shaped the emotional wave that followed her death, which carried her son Benigno Aquino III to the presidency in 2010 on a promise to continue her fight against corruption.

Among the basic Corazon Aquino facts that endure in public memory: she was the first female president in Asia to come to power through a popular revolution, her image appears on the Philippine 500 peso banknote alongside her husband's, and the Manila airport where he was killed carries his name. For students of any Corazon Aquino biography, her career remains the clearest demonstration in modern Southeast Asian history that an ordinary citizen, armed with legitimacy rather than weapons, could bring down an entrenched dictatorship ^[8].