Revisiting Corazon

Aquino’s Speech Before

the U.S. Congress
GROUP 5
PAMITTAN, CHARIE MAE
CALIS, PEARL JUFLOR
SUGAO, LAILA
APOSTOL, JHENNY
SUYAO, JOLINA
BANGIBANG, NEIPHEL
MANGAWIT, LACSON
OBSANIA, DRANREB JAY
Corazon “Cory”
Cojuangco Aquino
“The Mother of Revolution”
Functioned as the symbol of
the restoration of
democracy and the
overthrow of the Marcos
Dictatorship in 1896.
The People Power Revolution of
 Was a series of1986
popular
demonstrations in the Philippines
that began in 1983 and culminated in
1986. The methods used amounted to
a sustained campaign of civil
resistance against regime violence
and electoral fraud. This case of
nonviolent revolution led to the
departure of President Ferdinand
Marcos and the restoration of the
country’s democracy.
September 18, 1986
 was the time when Corazon
Aquino went to United States
and spoke before the joint
session of the U.S.
In her speech she talks about
the three times that they lost
Ninoy including his demise on
August 23, 1983.
The first time was when the
dictatorship detained Ninoy with
other dissenters.
Cory related:
“The government sought to break him 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, when Ninoy
survived the 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 they lost him.
She said:
“When that didn’t work, they put him on a trial of
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 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.
 “I held fast to Ninoy’s conviction that it must be by ways of democracy. I
held out for participation in 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 of the foregone results of elections that
were clearly going to be fraudulent. But I was not fighting for lawyers but for
the people 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 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 with barely a third of the seats in Parliament.
Now, I knew our power.”
Cory emphasized the importance of
EDSA Revolution in terms of being a
“limited revolution that respected
the life and freedom of every Filipino.

She 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.”
The Philippine Foreign Debt
In the 1970’s Marcos took out huge amounts
of foreign currency loans that by the 1980’s
his regime could not repay. He tried to hide
the dire financial situation by overstating
the figures for foreign reserves. By then the
economy was in free fall: GDP growth
dropped 5.3 percent, prices of primary
export commodities fell by 50 percent,
workers’ wages were reduced, and
unemployment hit of the labor force. The
crisis worsened with the assassination of
Ninoy Aquino in August 1983.
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 stated:
“Wherever I went in the campaign, slum area or
impoverished village. They came to me with one cry,
democracy. Not food 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 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.”
In her speech Cory even 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
people who want it by themselves and need only the
help to preserve it.”
She ended her speech by
thanking America for serving as
home to her family for what he
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
Analysis of Cory Aquino’s Speech

An important event in political and

diplomatic history of the country.
Talked about her family
background especially her
relationship with her late husband,
Ninoy Aquino.
Talked about Ninoy’s toil and
suffering at the hand of the
dictatorship of Marcos.
The ideology of the principles of the
new democratic government can
also be seen in the same speech.
Revealed certain parallelisms
between her and the Marcos
government.
She recognized the large sum of
foreign debts incurred by the
Marcos regime that never benefited
the Filipino people.