Corazon " Cory" Cojuangco Aquino functioned as the symbol of the

restoration of democracy and the overthrow of the Marcos Dictatorship

in1986. The EDSA People Power, which installed Cory Aquino in the
presidency, put the Philippines in the international spotlight for
overthrowing a dictator through peaceful means. Cory was easily a figure of
the said revolution, as the widow of the slain Marcos oppositionist and
former Senator Benigno “ Ninoy“ Aquino Jr. Cory was hoisted as the
antithesis of the dictator. Her image as a mourning, widowed housewife who
had always been in the shadow of her husband and relatives and had no
experience in politics was juxtaposed against Marcos's statesmanship,
eloquence, charisma, and cunning political skills. Nevertheless, Cory was
able to capture the imagination of the people whose rights and freedom had
long been compromised throughout the Marcosregime. This is despite
the fact that Cory came from a rich haciendero familyin Tarlac and
owned vast estates of sugar plantation and whose relativesoccupy
local and national government positions.
The People Power Revolution of 1986 was widely recognized around the
world for its peaceful character. When former senator Ninoy Aquino was shot
at the tarmac of the Manila International Airport on 21 August1983, the
Marcos regime greatly suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Protests from different
sectors frequented different areas in the country. Marcos’s credibility in the
international community also suffered. Paired with the looming economic
crisis, Marcos had to do something to prove to his allies in the United States
that he remained to be the democratically anointed leader of the country.,
He called for a Snap Election in February 1986,where Corazon Cojuangco
Aquino, the widow of the slain senator was convinced to run against Marcos.
The canvassing was rigged to Marcos’s favor but the people expressed their
protests against the corrupt and authoritarian government. Leading military
officials of the regime and Martial Law orchestrators themselves, Juan Ponce
Enrile and Fidel V. Ramos, plotted to take over the presidency, until civilians
heeded the call of then Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin and other
civilian leaders gathered in EDSA. The overwhelming presence of civilians in
EDSA successfully turned a coup into a civilian demonstration. The
thousands of people who gathered overthrew Ferdinand Marcos fromthe
presidency after 21 years.
On 18 September 1986, seven months since Cory became president, shewent
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 podiumand
addressed the United States about her presidency and the challengesfaced
by the new republic. She began her speech with the story of her leavingthe
United States three years prior as a newly widowed wife of Ninoy Aquino.

She then told of Ninoy's character, conviction, and resolve in opposingthe

authoritarianism of Marcos. She talked of the three times that they lostNinoy
including his demise on 23 August 1983. The first time was when
thedictatorship 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 decided to do 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 continued:
" 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 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 ofNinoy. She
stated that the death of Ninoy sparked the revolution and theresponsibility
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 thatwere
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 theyended 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.“

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.
Thug, 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
brought about by the corrupt dictatorship of Marcos, 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."

Analysis of Cory Aquino's Speech

Cory Aquino's speech was an important event in the political and diplomatic
history of the country because it has arguably cemented the legitimacy of
the EDSA government in the international arena. The speech talks of her
family background, especially her relationship with her late husband, Ninoy
Aquino. It is well known that it was Ninoy who served as the real leading
figure of the opposition at that time. Indeed, Ninoy’s eloquence and charisma
could very well compete with that of Marcos.
 In her speech, Cory talked at length about Ninoy's toil and suffering at the
hands of the dictatorship that he resisted. Even when she proceeded talking
about her new government, she still went back to Ninoy's legacies and
lessons. Moreover, her attribution of the revolution to Ninoy's death
demonstrates not only Cory's personal perception on the revolution, but
since she was the president, it also represents what the dominant discourse
was at that point in our history.

The ideology or the principles of the new democratic government

can also be seen in the same speech. Aquino was able to draw the sharp
contrast between her government and of her predecessor by expressing
her commitment to a democratic constitution drafted by an independent
commission. She claimed that such constitution upholds and adheres
to the rights and liberty of the Filipino people. Cory also hoisted herself
as the reconciliatory agent after more than two decades of a polarizing
authoritarian politics. For example, Cory saw the blown-up communist
insurgency as a product of a repressive and corrupt government. Her
response to this insurgency rooted from her diametric opposition of the
dictator (i.e., initiating reintegration of communist rebels to the mainstream
Philippine society). Cory claimed that her main approach to this problem
was through peace and not through the sword of war.

Despite Cory's efforts to hoist herself as the exact opposite of Marcos,

her speech still revealed certain parallelisms between her and the Marcos's
government. This is seen in terms of continuing the alliance between the
Philippines and the United States despite the known affinity between the
said world super power and Marcos. The Aquino regime, as seen in Cory's
acceptance of the invitation to address the U.S. Congress and to the content
of the speech, decided to build and continue with the alliance between
the Philippines and the United States and effectively implemented an
essentially similar foreign policy to that of the dictatorship. For example,
Cory recognized that the large sum of foreign debts incurred by the Marcos
regime never benefitted the Filipino people. Nevertheless, Cory expressed
her intention to pay off those debts
 Unknown to many Filipinos was the fact that there was a choice of waiving
the said debt because those were the debt of the dictator and not of the
country. Cory's decision is an indicator of her government's intention to carry
on a debt-driven economy.

Reading through Aquino's speech, we can already take cues, not just on
Cory s individual ideas and aspirations, but also the guiding principles and
framework of the government that she represented.