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.
 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.
 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.26
 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.
Idon’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.