NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC

Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

REVISITING CORAZON AQUINOS SPEECH BEFORE THE US CONGRESS

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

democracy and the overthrow of the Marcos Dictatorship in 1986. 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
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 Marcos Aquino Jr. Cory was hoisted as the antithesis of the dictator. Her image regime. This
is despite the fact that Cory came from a rich haciendero family in Tarlac and owned vast
estates of sugar plantation and whose relatives occupy 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 August 1983, 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 from the presidency after 21
years.

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

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 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 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

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

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:

"T 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:

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

"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. Thus, she mentioned her protestations about the way the Philippines
was deprived Or choices to pay those debts within the capacity of the Filipino people 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:

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 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC
Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

"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 insurgeney 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."

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