R EPUBLIC OF THE P HILIPPINES

State Universities and Colleges

GUIMARAS STATE COLLEGE
Buenavista, Guimaras

Module 2
Readings in Philippine History

Name: Nomer H. Alavata Course/Year & Section: BSA-1A

Address: Alaguisoc, Jordan Guimaras Contact Number: 09152711802
Instructor’s Name:Wenmar Labra Deadline Period:________________

Lesson 7: Revisiting Corazon Aquino’s Speech Before the U.S. Congress

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of the lesson, the students must be able to:

1. Analyze the historical context and perspective of the document;

2. Examine the content of the document;
3. Relate the speech to the country’s current socio-economic and/or socio-political conditions.

Acquire

Historical Context
The gradual downfall of the dictatorial regime of President Ferdinand E. Marcos began with the assassination
of his political rival, former Denator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., on August 21, 1983 moments after the latter
returned from exile in the US. The murder of Ninoy Aquino set in motion a series of events that destabilized the
Marcos administration. Protest rallies erupted in the streets and other major cities in the provinces calling for Marcos
to resign. The Philippine economy began to falter amidst accusations of corruption by Marcos and his cronies.
Rumors continued to circulate that Marcos was sick. Following opinions by the U.S. government that he was losing
the mandate of the Filipino people, Marcos announced on American and local television that he would hold a snap
presidential election.
The opposition wanted to field their own candidates against Marcos but soon realized that they would not
stand a chance against the dictator if they would not unite and choose a common candidate. It was decided that
Ninoy’s widow, Corazon Aquino, would run as president with opposition leader, Salvador Laurel, as her running
mate.
The snap elections proved to be a farce. There was rampant cheating and violence that resulted in numerous
casualties. In the end, the Marcos’ allies at the Batasang Pambansa declared him the winner of the election. In
protest, Aquino would for a nationwide boycott of products of businesses that supported Marcos. Other anti-Marcos
groups vowed to continue the protests.
But on February 22, Marcos’ defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Armed Forces of the Philippines Vice-
Chief of Staff, Gen. Fidel Ramos announced their defection form the Marcos government. This led to what is known
in our history as the four-day People Power Revolution where civilians faced tanks and soldiers to protect the
soldiers and officers who defied the Marcos regime. Marcos eventually was flown to Hawaii where he lived in exile
and Aquino was sworn into office as President of the Philippines.
The People Power Revolution caught the imagination of the world. But there was a difficult task ahead.
President Aquino began to lead a country that had been badly damaged economically by the Marcos regime. In
September 1986, she went on a state visit to the United States where she spoke before the U.S. Congress to ask for
financial aid to the Philippines and conferred with then President Ronald Reagan. She also met with American
businessmen to convince them to invest in the Philippines. The nine-day visit was deemed a success by Filipino and
American newsmen.

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 R EPUBLIC OF THE P HILIPPINES
State Universities and Colleges
GUIMARAS STATE COLLEGE
Buenavista, Guimaras

About the Speaker

 Maria Corazon “Cory” Cojuangco Aquino was born on January 25, 1933 to a wealthy and politically
prominent family in Tarlac.
 She graduated from Mount St. Vincent College in New York City in 1954.
 She married a popular young politician, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.
 She lived the life of a politician’s wife, remaining in the background and raising their family of five children
while her husband’s career as a prominent opposition politician grew during the Marcos administration.
 Cory stood by her husband when he was arrested and imprisoned for eight years (1972-1980) by president
Marcos after Martial Law was declared in 1972.
 Released to get medical treatment, Cory accompanied Ninoy to the United States where he lived in exile for
three years.
 Cory was thrust into the limelight when Ninoy was assassinated upon his return to the Philippines in 1983.
 The Cory administration became known for its restoration of Philippine democracy.
 In January 1987, Cory Aquino was named the TIME Magazine’s 1986 Person of the Year.
 She returned to the limelight in 2001 supporting the impeachment of President Joseph Estrada in what later
became known as EDSA 2.
 In 2006, she was listed in the TIME Magazine’s issue called “60 YEARS OF ASIAN HEROES.”
 She died on August 1, 2009.

About the Speech

On 18 September 1986, seven months since Cory became president, she went to the United States and spoke
before the joint session of the U.S. Congress. Cory was welcomed with long applause as she took the podium and
addressed the United States about her presidency and the challenges faced by the new republic. She began her
speech with the story of her leaving the United States three years prior as a newly widowed wife of Ninoy Aquino.

She then told of Ninoy’s character, conviction, and resolve in opposing the authoritarianism of Marcos. She
talked of the three times that they lost Ninoy including his demise on 23 August 1983. The first time was when the
dictatorship detained Ninoy with other dissenters. Cory related:

“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 a threat of a sudden midnight execution over his head. Ninoy held up manfully
under all of it. I barely did as well. For forty-three 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”.

Cory continued that when Ninoy survived that first detention, he was then charged of subversion, murder,
and other crimes. He was tried by a military court, whose legitimacy Ninoy adamantly questioned. To solidify his
protest, Ninoy decide to a hunger strike and fasted for 40 days. Cory treated this event as the second time that their
family lost Ninoy She said:

“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 40th day”.

Ninoy’s death was the third and the last time that Cory and their children lost Ninoy. She said:

“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
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State Universities and Colleges
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Buenavista, Guimaras

death was my country’s resurrection and the courage and faith by which alone they
could be free again. The dictator had called him a nobody. Yet, two million people threw
aside their passivity and fear and escorted him to his grave.”

Cory attributed the peaceful EDSA Revolution to the martyrdom of Ninoy. She stated that the death of Ninoy
sparked the revolution and the responsibility of “offering the democratic alternative” had “fallen on (her) shoulders.”
Cory’s address introduced us to her democratic philosophy, which she claimed she also acquired from Ninoy. She
argued:

“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.”

Cory talked about her miraculous victory through the people’s struggle and continued talking about her
earliest initiatives as the president of a restored democracy. She stated that she intended to forge and draw
reconciliation after a bloody and polarizing dictatorship. Cory emphasized the importance of the EDSA Revolution
in terms of being a “limited revolution that respected the life and freedom of every Filipino.” She also boasted of the
restoration of a fully constitutional government whose constitution gave utmost respect to the Bill of Rights. She
reported to the U.S. Congress:

“Again, as we restore 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 elections for both national and local positions. So,
within about a year from a peaceful but national upheaval that overturned a
dictatorship, we shall have returned to full constitutional government”.

Cory then proceeded on her peace agenda with the existing communist insurgency, aggravated by the
dictatorial and authoritarian measure of Ferdinand Marcos. She asserted:

“My predecessor set aside democracy to save it from a communist insurgency that
numbered less than five hundred. Unhampered by respect for human rights he went at it
with hammer and tongs. By the time he fled, that insurgency had grown to more than
sixteen thousand. I think there is a lesson here to be learned about trying to stifle a thing
with a means by which it grows”.

Cory’s peace agenda involves political initiatives and re-integration program to persuade insurgents to leave
the countryside and return to the mainstream society to participate in the restoration of democracy. She invoked the
path of peace because she believed that it was the moral path that a moral government must take. Nevertheless, Cory
took a step back when she said that while peace is the priority of her presidency, she “will not waiver” when freedom
and democracy are threatened. She said that, similar to Abraham Lincoln, she understands that “force may be
necessary before mercy” and while she did not relish the idea, she “will do whatever it takes to defend the integrity
and freedom of (her) country”.

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Cory then turned to the controversial topic of the Philippine foreign debt amounting to $26 billion at the time
of her speech. This debt had ballooned during the Marcos regime. Cory expressed her intention to honor those debts
despite mentioning that the people did not benefit from such debts. Thus, she mentioned her protestations about the
way the Philippines was deprived of choices to pay those debts within the capacity of the Filipino people. She
lamented:

“Finally may I turn to that other slavery, our twenty-six billion dollar foreign debt. I
have said that we shall honor it. Yet, the means by which we shall be able to do so are
kept from us. Many of the conditions imposed on the previous government that stole this
debt, continue to be imposed on us who never benefited from it.

She continued that while the country had experienced the calamities about by the corrupt dictatorship of
arcos, no commensurate assistance was yet to be extended to the Philippines. She even remarked that given the
peaceful character of EDSA People Power revolution, “ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever.” She
demonstrated that Filipino people fulfilled the “most difficult condition of the debt negotiation,” which was the
“restoration of democracy and responsible government”.

Cory related to the U.S. legislators that wherever she went, she met poor and unemployed Filipinos willing to
offer their lives for democracy. She stated:

“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 give
them work that will put dignity in their lives. But I feel the pressing obligation to
respond quickly as the leader of the people so deserving of all these things”.

Cory proceeded in enumerating the challenges of the Filipino people as they tried building the new
democracy. These were the persisting communist insurgency and the economic deterioration. Cory further lamented
that these problems worsened by the crippling debt because half of the country’s export earnings amounting to $2
billion would “go to pay just the interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people never received.” Cory then
asked a rather compelling question to the U.S Congress:

“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 want it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.”

Cory ended her speech by thanking America for serving as home to her family for what she referred to as the
“three happiest years of our lives together”. She enjoined America in building the Philippines as a new home for
democracy and in turning the country as a “shining testament of our two nations’ commitment to freedom.”

References:

Candelaria, J. & Alporha, V. (2018). Readings in Philippine History. Manila, Philippines: REX Book Store.
Torres, J. (2018). BATIS: Sources in Philippine History. Quezon City: C & E Publishing, Inc.

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