Lesson 4

SPEECH OF PRESIDENT CORAZON C. AQUINO

BEFORE THE JOINT SESSION OF THE UNITED
STATES CONGRESS

The gradual downfall of the dictatorial regime of President Ferdinand E. Marcos began
with the assassination of his political rival, former Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. on
August 21, 1983 moments after the latter returned from exile in the United States. The murder
of Ninoy Aquino set in motion a series of events that destabilized the Marcos administration.
Protest rallies erupted in the streets of Manila and other major cities in the provinces calling for
Marcos to resign. The Philippines 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 the opposition leader, Salvador Laurel, as her running mate.

The snap elections proved to be a farce. There were 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 business 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, Ge. Fidel V. Ramos announced their defection from the
Marcos government. This led to what is now 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 deemed a success by Filipino and
American newsmen.
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. A year later, 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.

Corazon Aquino was thrust into the limelight when Ninoy

was assassinated upon his return to the Philippines in 1983. She became part of the growing
opposition to the Marcos dictatorship which culminated in her presidential candidate for a united
opposition in the snap elections in 1986. Losing the elections because of massive cheating,
Cory challenged the results of the election by calling for a boycott of all industries of Marcos
cronies. It was not long before military officials publicly renounced Marcos and supported Cory
as the duly-elected president. The four-day People Power Revolution in February 1986 ended
the Marcos dictatorship and propelled Cory as the first Filipino woman president.

The Cory administration became known for its

restoration of Philippine democracy. A new constitution was
written and a Congress was soon elected. But the euphoria of
the newly-restored freedom dis does not last as Aquino
administration failed to enforce social and economic reforms.
The problems of peace and order, especially with the
communist insurgency, continued and it was not long before the
government was also dealing with rightist elements in the
military that led to several attempted coups. She was
succeeded to the presidency by her former Armed Forces Chief
of Staff and Defense Secretary Fidel Ramos in 1992.

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.
Speech of Her Excellency Corazon C. Aquino President of the Philippines before the
Joint Session of the United States Congress [Delivered at Washington, D.C. on
September 18, 1986]

Mr. Speaker, Senator Thurmond, Distinguished members

of Congress, 3 years ago I left America in grief, to bury my
husband Ninoy Aquino. I thought I had left it also, to lay to rest his
restless dream of Philippine freedom. Today, I have returned as
the President of a free people.

In burying Ninoy, a whole nation honored him. By that

brave and selfless act of giving honor to a nation in shame
recovered its own. A country that had lost faith in its future, found
it in a faithless ana brazen act of murder. So, in giving we receive,
in losing we find, and out of defeat we snatch our victory.

For the nation, Ninoy became the pleasing sacrifice that

answered their prayers for freedom. For myself and our children,
Ninoy was a loving husband and father. His loss, three times in
our lives was always a deep and painful one.
Fourteen years ago this month, was the first time we lost him. A President turned
dictator and traitor to his oath, suspended the constitution and shut down the Congress that was
much like this one before which I’m honored to speak. He detained my husband along with
thousands of others - Senators, publishers, and anyone who had spoken up for the democracy
as its end drew near. But for Ninoy, a long and cruel ordeal was reserved. The dictator already
knew that Ninoy was not a body merely to be imprisoned but a spirit he must break. For even as
the dictatorship demolished one-by-one; the institutions of democracy, the press, the Congress,
the independence of a judiciary, the protection of the Bill of Rights, Ninoy kept their spirit alive in
himself.

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.

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. God meant him for other things, he felt. He did not know that an early death would still be
his fate, that only the timing was wrong. B

At any time during his long ordeal, Ninoy could have made a separate peace with a
dictatorship as so many of his countrymen had done. But the spirit of democracy that inheres in
our race and animates this chamber could not be allowed to die. He held out in the loneliness of
his cell and the frustration of exile, the democratic alternative to the insatiable greed and
mindless cruelty of the right and the purging holocaust of the left.
 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. And so began the revolution that has brought me to
democracy’s most famous home, the Congress of the United States.

The task had fallen on my shoulders, to continue offering the democratic alternative to
our people.

Archibald MacLeish had said that democracy must be defended by arms when it is
attacked by arms and with the truth when it is attacked by lies. He failed to say how it shall be
won.

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 Iran 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.

Last year, in an excess of arrogance, the dictatorship called for its doom in a snap
election. The people obliged. With over a million signatures they drafted me to challenge the
dictatorship. And I, obliged. The rest is the history that dramatically unfolded on your television
screens and across the front pages of your newspapers.

You saw a nation armed with courage and integrity, stand fast by democracy against
threats and corruption. You saw women poll watchers break out in tears as armed goons
crashed the polling places to steal the ballots. But just the same, they tied themselves to the
ballot boxes. You saw a people so committed to the ways of democracy that they were prepared
to give their lives for its pale imitation. At the end of the day, before another wave of fraud could
distort the results, I announced the people’s victory.

Many of you here today played a part in changing the policy of your country towards
ours. We, the Filipinos thank each of you for what you did. For balancing America’s strategic
interest against human concerns illuminates the American vision of the world. The co-chairman
of the United States observer team, in his report to the President, said, “I was witness to an
extraordinary manifestation of democracy on the part of the Filipino people. The ultimate result
was the election of Mrs. Corazon Aquino as President and Mr. Salvador Laurel as Vice-
President of the Philippines. ’’
 When a subservient parliament announced my opponent’s victory, the people then
turned out in the streets and proclaimed me the President of all the people. And true to their
word, when a handful of military leaders declared themselves against the dictatorship, the
people rallied to their protection. Surely, people take care of their own. It is on that faith and the
obligation it entails that I assumed the Presidency. As I came to power peacefully, so shall I
keep it. That is my contract with my people and my commitment to God. He had willed that the
blood drawn with a lash shall not in my country be paid by blood drawn by the sword but by the
tearful joy of reconciliation. We have swept away absolute power by a limited revolution that
respected the life and freedom of every Filipino.

Now, we are restoring full constitutional government. 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.

Given the polarization and breakdown we inherited, this is no small achievement. 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.
I don’t think anybody in or outside our country, concerned for democratic and open Philippines
doubts what must be done. Through political initiatives and local re-integration programs, we
must seek to bring the insurgents down from the hills and by economic progress and justice,
show them that which the best-intentioned among them fight. As president among my people, I
will not betray the cause of peace by which I came to power. Yet, equally and again, no friend of
Filipino democracy will challenge this. I will not stand by and allow insurgent leadership to spurn
our offer of peace and kill our young soldiers and threaten our new freedom.

Yet, I must explore the path of peace to the utmost. For at its end, whatever
disappointment I meet there is the moral basis for laying down the Olive branch of peace and
taking up the sword of war.

Still, should it come to that, I will not waiver from the course laid down by your great
liberator.

“With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us
to see the right, let us finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds. To care for him
who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and for his orphans to do all which may
achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. ”

Like Abraham Lincoln, I understand that force may be necessary before mercy. Like
Lincoln, I don’t relish it. Yet, I will do whatever it takes to defend the integrity and freedom of my
country.

Finally, may I turn to that other slavery: our $26 billion 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.

And no assistance or liberality commensurate with the calamity that was vested on us
has been extended. Yet ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever. With little help from
others, we Filipinos fulfilled the first and most difficult condition of the debt negotiation, the full
restoration of democracy and responsible government. Elsewhere and in other times, more
stringent world economic conditions, marshal plans and their like were felt to be necessary
companions of returning democracy.

When I met with President Reagan, we began an important dialogue about cooperation
and the strengthening of friendship between our two countries. That meeting was both a
confirmation and a new beginning. I am sure it will lead to positive results in all areas of
common concern. Today, we face the aspiration of a people who have known so much poverty
and massive unemployment for the past 14 years. And yet offer their lives for the abstraction of
democracy.

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 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.

We face a communist insurgency that feeds on economic deterioration even as we carry

a great share of the free world defenses in the Pacific. These are only two of the many burdens
my people carry even as they try to build a worthy and enduring house for their new democracy.
That may serve as well as a redoubt for freedom in Asia. Yet, no sooner as one stone laid than
two are taken away. Half our export earnings, $2 billion dollars out of $4 billion dollars which is
all we can earn in the restrictive market of the world, must go to pay just the interest on a debt
whose benefit the Filipino people never received.

Still, we fought for honor and if only for honor, we shall pay. And yet, should we have to
ring the payments from the sweat of our men’s faces and sink all the wealth piled by the
bondsman’s two-hundred fifty years of unrequited toil. Yet, to all Americans, as the leader to a
proud and free people, I address this question, “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.”

Three years ago I said, Thank you America for the haven from oppression and the home
you gave Ninoy, myself and our children and for the three happiest years of our lives together.
Today I say, join us America as we build a new home for democracy; another haven for the
oppressed so it may stand as a shining testament of our two nations’ commitment to freedom.

Analysis of Corazon 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 Ninyo’s toil and
suffering at the hands of the dictatorship he resisted. Even when she proceeded to talk about
her new government, she still went back to Ninyo’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 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 parallelism between her and 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 superpower 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 on 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 benefited
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 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.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Guide Questions

1. Discuss the context the speech was delivered.

2. Watch the speech of Cory Aquino. Describe the scene. How was the speech? How
did the audience react to her half-hour-long address?
3. What was in her speech that convinced the House of Representatives to grant two-
hundred million dollar emergency aid to the Philippines? What were the issues
raised or views pointed out in her address?
4. How did the speech affect you as a viewer? In what way would it be rendered
relevant to the current conditions of our country? Cite specific lines from the speech.
5. What are the points in her speech that you agree and disagree with? Which lines hit
home?

Be sure you get a perfect score in Lesson 4. It’s a brief lesson, isn’t it?