Revisiting Corazon Aquino’s

Speech Before the U.S. Congress

Group Members:
Bolongaita, Jay Mark
Luces, Gerardo
Mañibo, John Oliver
Mendoza, Billy
Magmanlac, Krystal Mae Evangelista
Maria Corazon Cojuangco Aquino
Born: 25 January 1933, Paniqui, Tarlac 
Died: 1 August 2009, Makati Medical Center, Makati
Presidential term: 25 February 1986 – 30 June 1992

Popularly known as Cory Aquino, was a Filipino

politician who served as the 11th President of the
Philippines, becoming the first woman to hold that
office.

The most prominent figure of the 1986 People Power

Revolution, which ended the 21-year rule of
President Ferdinand Marcos.
 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 or 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 Marcos 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
position.
The People Power Revolution of 1996

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 21st of 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.
 People Power Revolution
22 Feb 1986 – 25 Feb 1986
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.
Corazon Aquino’s Speech Before the
U.S. Congress
 On 18th of 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 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
Aquino and Sen. Diokno was one of the first to be arrested and imprisoned
on trumped-up charges of murder, illegal possession of firearms and
subversion. He was tried before Military Commission No. 2, headed by
Major-General Jose Syjuco and brought to Fort Magsaysay in Laur, Nueva
Ecija.
 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.
 “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.
 Ninoy’s death was the third and the last time that Cory and their
children lost Ninoy. She continued:

“And then, we lost 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
 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” and “fallen on
(her) shoulders.” Cory’s address introduced us
to her democratic philosophy, which she
climed 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
 Cory talked about her miraculous victory through the
people’s people 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 or 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 dictatorship
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 learned about trying to stifle a
 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
Philippines 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 turn to that other slavery, our twenty-sex
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 Revolution, “our must have been 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 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.”
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 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 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 effectivity implemented an essentially similar foreign policy to
that of the dictatorship. For example, Cory recognized that the large sum of
foreign debt 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 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.

END….

If you want to watch the full speech of former the president Cory Aquino in U.S.
Congress, please visit: Corazon Aquino - U.S. Congress Speech on youtube.com
Report sources: Secondary
Book “Readings in Philippine History”
Author : John Lee P. Candelaria
Veronica C. Alporha
Internet (Cory’s Biography)
en.Wikipedia.com
(Images)
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rappler
squiremag.ph
positivelyfilipino.com