Here's a paradox for you. It's one of those things
that when you really map it out, it just creates
a real headache. You have this political landscape,
right? It's completely dominated by Machiavellian
strongmen, military juntas, entrenched dynasties.
It's a brutal game. A totally brutal, violent
game where the currency is basically fear. And
then the person who comes along and breaks a
20 year dictatorship isn't a general. It isn't
some rival warlord. No, it's someone who I mean,
if you look at it on paper, they shouldn't even
be on the playing field. Right. We're looking
at a self -described housewife, someone who majored
in French and mathematics, of all things, who,
by her own admission, stayed in the back of the
room during her husband's political rallies.
And yet. Corazon Coriaquino, she didn't just
inherit a presidency. No, she dismantled a regime.
And became the first female president in the
Philippines. And in all of Asia in the process.
Which is just staggering when you think about
it. But here's the mission for this deep dive.
We've got this whole stack of sources in front
of us. Biographies, economic data from the 80s,
constitutional texts. We really want to move
past that St. Cory image. You know, the yellow
ribbons, the peace signs. The iconography. Exactly.
We need to figure out how she actually governed.
Because what the sources really suggest is that
winning the revolution might have been the easy
part. Oh, compared to what came next. Absolutely.
Yeah. The governance part is where the story
gets incredibly gritty. I mean, you're talking
about a brand new government trying to survive
constant military coups, a totally bankrupt treasury.
And natural disasters that just felt biblical
in scale. Yeah, it was one thing after another.
So let's try to strip away the mythology and
actually look at the mechanics of this takeover.
Because to understand her presidency, you first
have to understand the specific kind of elite
she came from. The word housewife feels like
a bit of a marketing term, doesn't it? It was
an incredibly effective political brand. You're
right. It wasn't the whole truth. Maria Corazon
Simulong Cojuangco was born into, well, the 0
.1%. The Cojuangcos and the Simulongs are essentially
Philippine royalty. We're talking massive landowners.
Massive. And political heavyweights. Her father
was a congressman, a major businessman. Her grandfather
was in the historic Malolos Congress. This is
a woman who grew up completely fluent in the
language of power. And as we said, literally
fluent in French. Right. And she was brilliant
academically. Valedictorian in grade school,
attended these finishing schools in Philadelphia,
New York, and then graduated from the College
of Mount St. Vincent. But look at her major.
French and mathematics. French and math. That
is such a fascinating combination. It's logic
and linguistics. It's not the degree you get
if your plan is to just, you know, sit around.
No, it tells you something about how her mind
works. She wasn't just, you know, culturally
refined. She was rigorous. It speaks to a very
structured, logical way of thinking. But for
the first part of her adult life, she completely
submerged that. She married Benigno Ninoy Aquino
Jr. in 1954, and he was the superstar. The youngest
governor, the youngest senator. He was the one
who was destined for Malacanang Palace. And she
was the logistics manager behind the scenes.
Essentially, yeah. She raised five children.
She hosted his political allies. And there's
this really telling detail in a couple of the
biographies. She would intentionally avoid the
stage during his rallies. She wanted to be in
the audience. She preferred to stand at the back
with the crowd. She just did not want the limelight.
But there's this little nugget in the financial
records that people often miss. She sold a portion
of her own inheritance to fund Ninoy's campaigns.
Which is a crucial detail. It's huge. She wasn't
just a passive observer. She was a financier.
She was a silent partner in the entire enterprise.
It shows she was a partner in the ambition, just
not the public face of it. But then that whole
dynamic shifts, and it shifts violently. In 1972,
Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law. And Ninoy
is one of the very first people arrested. Thrown
in prison. And just like that, Corey's life of
hosting parties and raising kids in the suburbs
is completely over. This is where the housewife
really enters the crucible. It was seven long
years of incarceration for Ninoy. And Corey,
she adopted this life of self -denial. The sources
detail how she stopped buying clothes. She stopped
going to beauty salons. She even stopped her
kids from going to parties. Yeah. It was an act
of solidarity, a private protest. She was hardening
herself for what was coming. Which prepares her
for the big catalyst. Eventually, the family
is allowed to go into exile in the U .S. for
Ninoy's medical treatment. They have about three
years of peace of normalcy in Boston. But Ninoy
decides he has to go back. He knew the risks.
He had to know. So in 1983, he flies back to
Manila. He steps off the plane. And is immediately
assassinated on the tarmac. That image of him
in the white suit lying bloodied on the tarmac,
I mean, that changed everything. It just broke
the dam of fear. And when Corey returned to the
Philippines to lead his funeral procession, two
million people showed up. Two million? That was
the data point the opposition needed. They suddenly
realized the traditional politicians, the old
guard, they couldn't unite the country. Only
the widow could. But she resisted. She really
did not want the job. It actually took a petition
with 1 .2 million signatures to finally get her
to agree to run. And this was for the snap election
Marcos called in late 85. He thought he could
catch the opposition off guard. And this campaign.
I mean, looking back at the transcripts of what
Marcos was saying, it was just incredibly nasty.
It was a classic authoritarian playbook, right?
He framed it as democracy versus communism, trying
to link her to insurgents. But then he leaned
so heavily into misogyny. Oh, yeah. He called
her just a woman. He said women's talk should
be limited to the bedroom. Which, looking back
now, was such a massive tactical error. A huge
one. Because Corey used that logical... You know,
that math mind we were talking about. She just
flipped the entire narrative. She stood up and
admitted, yes, I have no political experience.
But then she immediately followed it up with.
But I also have no experience in lying, cheating
or stealing. It was a knockout punch. She turned
her lack of a resume into her primary asset.
She wasn't a politician, which meant she wasn't
corrupt. Exactly. The whole thing became a referendum
on moral authority. And when the election finally
happened on February 7th, 1986, the machinery
of the dictatorship tried to crush that authority
with just blatant fraud. The government parliament,
the Bada sign Pambansa, they declare Marcos the
winner. But the independent watchdog, NMFREL,
their numbers showed Corey winning. So you have
two different results and the country is on a
knife's edge. But then you have this one scene
that feels like it belongs in a techno thriller.
The computer technicians. The walkout at the
PICC, it's such an incredible moment. You had
30 computer technicians from Comelec, the official
election commission, and they're watching the
raw data come in from the provinces. And they
can see it. They see the numbers being manipulated
in real time on the back end to favor Marcos.
And in this moment of just insane bravery, they
all just stand up and walk out in front of the
press. That's the emperor has no clothes moment
right there. It confirmed the rig for the entire
world to see. So Corey calls for a massive civil
disobedience campaign. She holds a rally, the
Tagumpang Bayan, or People's Victory Rally. Two
million people show up again, and she tells them
to boycott the crony companies. The banks, the
media, even the soda companies owned by Marcos'
allies. She hit them right in the wallet. And
that economic pressure, combined with the moral
outrage from the walkout, finally cracks the
military. Her defense minister, Juan Ponce N.
Ryle, and the vice chief of staff. General Fidel
V. Ramos, they defect. They hole up in the military
camps along the main highway, EDSA, and they
basically dare Marcos to come and get them. And
this is where the Catholic Church steps in. Cardinal
Sin gets on the radio. and appeals to the faithful,
telling them to go to EDSA to protect the rebels.
And millions show up. They face down tanks with
flowers and rosaries. It was this massive, nonviolent
demonstration that just froze the military. Marcos
realizes he can't shoot his way out of this without
a massacre, which the U .S., his main backer,
would never support. So it all culminates on
February 25, 1986. Corey is sworn in as the 11th
president in one part of town. About an hour
later, Marcos holds his own inauguration. But
he flees to Hawaii that same day. The dictator
is gone. And this is where the movie usually
ends, with the credits rolling. But for us, this
is where the deep dive really begins. Because
now she's sitting in Malakanyang Palace, the
confetti has all been swept away, and the country
she's inherited is an absolute wreck. And wreck
might be an understatement. She inherits a bankrupt
nation. a divided military, multiple insurgencies.
But her first move is so bold, and it's one of
the most interesting constitutional maneuvers
in modern Asian history. She issues proclamation
number three. The Freedom Constitution. That's
right. To restore democracy, she effectively
declared a revolutionary government. She abolished
the 1973 Marcos Constitution. She dissolved the
rubber stamp parliament, and she fired every
single Marcos appointee. All the way up to the
Supreme Court. All the way to the top. Wait a
minute. So to fix the dictatorship, she had to
assume dictatorial powers herself. That is the
central paradox of her first year. For a short
time, she held both executive and legislative
power. Her argument, and the argument of her
legal team, was that the existing system was
so poisoned, so booby -trapped by Marcos, that
she had to bulldoze it to build a new foundation.
You couldn't just, you know, operate the old
machine. You had to scrap it for parts. A very
hard reset. But, and this is the absolute key
difference, she immediately used those absolute
powers to draft a new constitution that explicitly
stripped her of that same power. The 1987 Constitution.
Which restored the bicameral Congress, limited
the president to a single six -year term with
no re -election, and installed a massive Bill
of Rights. She was effectively using absolute
power to make sure no one could ever have absolute
power again. Which is incredibly rare. Usually
when people get that kind of power, they find
very good reasons to keep it. Exactly. And she
also pushed through the local government code
of 1991, which was another huge deal. It devolved
power from the national government in Manila
down to local units. She was deliberately dismantling
the centralized power structure that Marcos had
perfected. Okay, so that's the legal and political
cleanup. But the economic cleanup? That seems
like a much, much messier job. The numbers in
these reports are just staggering. Foreign debt
went from, what, around $3 billion in 1970? To
$28 billion by the time Marcos fled. $28 billion.
And the Treasury was empty. Completely empty.
Yeah. So Corey's government faced this binary
choice, and it's one that economists still debate
today. Option A was to repudiate the debt. Basically
say the dictator stole this money. The Filipino
people didn't benefit from these loans, so we
aren't paying it back. Which is the moral argument,
right? Why should a rice farmer in Luzon have
to pay for a loan that went into some Swiss bank
account or a failed nuclear power plant? Precisely.
And the political left was screaming for this.
They wanted a clean slate. But Cori and her economic
team, they took option B. They chose to honor
all the debts. Every single cent. Even the unjust
ones. Even the fraudulent ones. Why? I mean,
that seems like political suicide. You're basically
taking money away from schools and hospitals
to pay foreign banks for loans your country never
even saw. It was a cold, pragmatic calculation.
Her team argued that they had to restore the
Philippines' international credit reputation.
They feared that if they defaulted, the country
would become a pariah. to the global banking
system no more trade financing no development
loans total isolation right she chose what she
called honor to keep the credit lines open for
the future so she sacrificed short -term welfare
for long -term credibility yes and the cost was
incredibly high for her entire six -year term
huge chunks of the national budget went straight
to debt servicing just paying the interest It
hamstrung her ability to build infrastructure
or fund social services. It's a major reason
why the poverty numbers remain so stubborn and
why, you know, people started to get frustrated
a few years in. She did try to go after the stolen
money, though, right? The PCGG. She did. She
established the PCG, the Presidential Commission
on Good Government, to hunt down the billions
in ill -gotten wealth. And she also dismantled
some of the huge crony monopolies in the sugar
and coconut industries. And the economy did start
to recover, didn't it? It did. The economy grew
at an average of 3 .8 % during her term, which
is decent, and inflation dropped significantly.
But that debt service, it was a constant anchor
around the neck of the recovery. And speaking
of frustration and poverty, we have to talk about
land reform. This was supposed to be the centerpiece
social program of her entire administration,
CRRP. The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law.
This is probably the most glaring contradiction
of her presidency. The goal was so noble. To
finally break up the old feudal estates and give
land to the tenant farmers who worked it. Which
in a country that was still semi -feudal in many
areas was seen as the key to ending rural poverty.
It was the silver bullet. Yeah. But Corrie came
from the landlord class. The Kowankos owned Hacienda
Luisita, a massive 6 ,453 hectare sugar estate.
One of the biggest contiguous estates in the
entire country. So you have this situation where
she's passing a law to redistribute land. while
her own family owns a massive chunk of it. That's
a huge conflict of interest. And when the law
was finally passed, it contained a critical,
some would say fatal, loophole. It allowed corporate
landowners to use something called a stock distribution
option. Okay, what does that mean? Instead of
giving the farmers the actual dirt, the land
titles, the corporation could give them shares
of stock in the company that owned the land.
Oh. So farmers get a piece of paper and the family
gets to keep the land intact. Basically. And
Hacienda Luisita used that option immediately.
It allowed the Kowanko family to maintain control
of the estate. And to the critics, especially
the peasant groups who had marched and fought
for this, it felt like a total betrayal. It looked
like the president had rigged her own signature
program to protect her own family. It really
punches a hole in the St. Cory narrative. It
shows the limits of her revolutionary zeal when
it bumped up against her own class interests.
It does. And that kind of disillusionment, it
fueled the instability because while she was
battling economists over debt and landowners
over reform, she was also literally battling
for her life. The coup attempts. The list here
is just exhausting. I mean, the sources say numerous
coup attempts. Depending on how you count them,
there were somewhere between seven and nine serious
attempts between 1986 and 1990. And the incredible
irony. They were led by some of the same guys
that were formed the Armed Forces Movement, or
RAM, who had helped put her in power during the
EDSA revolution. So why did they turn on her
so quickly? It seems like a case of buyer's remorse.
They didn't want a liberal democracy. They wanted
a military -guided Jinta. They saw Corrie as
soft on communists because she released political
prisoners and tried to negotiate peace. They
wanted to save the queen from her own leftist
advisors. It's a classic Praetorian Guard mentality.
And it created this terrifying environment for
governance. I mean, imagine trying to court foreign
investors and every six months or so there are
tanks rolling down the main highway in your capital
city. It would just kill any economic momentum.
The 1989 coup attempt was particularly bloody
and damaging. It actually required U .S. air
support from Clark Air Base to help suppress
it. And that shattered the illusion of stability.
It sent the economy into a dip. Amidst all this
military posturing, the government lost a lot
of its moral high ground with the Mendiola massacre.
January 1987. This was a true tragedy. Thousands
of farmers marched to Mendiola Bridge, which
is right near the presidential palace, demanding
genuine land reform, no stock options, real land.
The Marines opened fire. Twelve people were killed,
over 50 injured. For an administration that was
built on the principle of people power and nonviolence,
that must have been just devastating. It was
a turning point. It caused her own human rights
commissioner, the legendary Jose Diacno, to resign
in protest. It led to the collapse of peace talks
with the communist insurgents. It showed that
the state apparatus was still capable of brutality,
regardless of who was sitting in the president's
chair. And speaking of conflict, she was also
dealing with the long -running more insurgency
in the south. She tried to make peace there too.
She famously went down to the island of Jolo
and met with the MNLF leader Nirmizwari, which
was a very brave move. It led to the creation
of the ARMM, the Autonomous Region in Muslim
Mindanao. It was a genuine step toward autonomy.
But a splinter group, the MILF, kept fighting.
And terrifyingly, this was the period when the
terrorist group Abu Sayyaf was founded around
1989. So you've got political instability, constant
military rebellion, economic stagnation from
the debt. And then the universe just decides
to pile on. Section seven of our notes here is
just titled Acts of God. It is genuinely difficult
to believe the sequence of events happened to
one administration in such a short time. It starts
with the MV Doña Paz in 1987. A passenger ferry
collided with an oil tanker. The death toll was
just horrific. Over 4 ,300 people died. It is
still the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster
in recorded history. Worse than the Titanic.
It was a massive national trauma. And then the
earth itself starts shaking. The 1990 Luzon earthquake.
A magnitude 7 .8 to just flatten cities in the
north like Baguio and Cabanatuan. And then the
big one, Mount Pinatubo in 1991. A volcano that
everyone thought was dormant. It hadn't erupted
in hundreds of years. When it finally blew, it
was the second largest terrestrial eruption of
the entire 20th century. It buried central Luzon
in volcanic ash. It destroyed the agricultural
heartland. And strategically, it completely buried
the U .S. airbase at Clark. Which sort of forced
the issue on the whole American military presence.
Right. That was another massive headache she
was dealing with. The Philippine Senate, driven
by nationalism, wanted the U .S. bases out Sibic
Naval Base and Clark Air Base. They saw it as
an issue of sovereignty. But Cori initially wanted
them to stay. Why? Pragmatism, again. She was
worried about the thousands of Filipinos who
worked on those bases and the economic impact
of them leaving so suddenly. She even led a protest
march to try and convince the Senate to keep
the bases. The president protesting her own Senate.
Exactly. But the Senate voted to eject them.
And then Pinatubo erupted and basically sealed
the deal for Clark Air Base. The Americans left.
But there is one man -made disaster from this
period that I think, for many people, defines
the daily experience of the late core years even
more than the volcano. The lights went out. The
power crisis. This is a classic case of good
intentions leading to really bad outcomes. Early
in her term, Corey's administration decided to
mothball the Bataan nuclear power plant. This
was the big controversial plant built by Marcos.
Yes. It was riddled with corruption issues and
worse, major safety concerns. It sits near a
fault line and a volcano. So deciding not to
turn it on was arguably the safe moral choice.
But there's a but. The big but is that the administration
failed to build a replacement energy source.
They completely underestimated the growing demand
for electricity. They didn't ramp up coal or
geothermal or anything else fast enough. So by
the end of her term. By the end of her term,
Manila was experiencing 7 to 12 hour blackouts.
Every single day. There was a bitter joke at
the time. Corey Magic, now you see the light,
now you don't. It was brutal. It decimated small
businesses. You can't run a factory or a restaurant
or even small shop without power. It just soured
the public mood completely right at the end of
her term. People were exhausted. So we get to
1992. She's tired. Her popularity has taken a
serious hit from the blackouts and the instability.
Her advisors come to her and say, hey, you know,
technically you weren't sworn in under the 1987
Constitution. That one term limit doesn't apply
to you. You can run again. And this right here
is the moment that I think secures her legacy.
She says, no, absolutely not. She understood
that the single most important thing she could
do for the future of Philippine democracy was
not to fix the power plants, but to step down.
To show that power can be transferred peacefully.
That the system works. She endorses Fidel Ramos,
the general who stuck by her during all the coups,
and he wins the election. And there's this one
detail about her last day in office. She rides
to the inauguration in the presidential Mercedes.
But after the ceremony. After the ceremony, she
leaves in a plain white Toyota Crown. No entourage,
no security detail, just a citizen driving away.
That is such a powerful visual. But she didn't
exactly retire to a rocking chair, did she? No,
not at all. She became what people call the guardian
of democracy. She would show up whenever she
felt that democracy was being threatened. She
actively campaigned against charter change, attempts
by later presidents like Ramos and Estrada, to
change the Constitution to extend their term
limits. And she was instrumental in the EDSA
to a second movement, which ousted President
Joseph Estrada in 2001. She was, though interestingly,
the sources note that she later apologized to
Estrada for her role in that. That's fascinating.
Why? It was a very nuanced apology. years later,
in 2008. She basically admitted that while she
felt his ouster was necessary at the time because
of corruption, the extra -constitutional nature
of it, using street power to remove a leader
again, had negative long -term consequences for
the rule of law. She recognized the double -edged
sword of people power. She was always watching,
always re -evaluating. She even called for Gloria
Macapagal -Arroyo's resignation in 2005 over
election -rigging allegations. She never really
left the stage. And then the end came. She was
diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2008, and
she passed away on August 1st, 2009. And the
reaction from the public? It was like 1986 all
over again. All the cynicism about the blackouts
and the coups and the compromises just seemed
to fade away. And people remembered the symbol.
The yellow ribbons came back out everywhere.
She had declined a state funeral. Her family
wanted a private one. But the public just turned
it into a state event anyway. Hundreds of thousands
of people lined the streets for her funeral procession.
So when we synthesize all of this, the math major,
the housewife, the widow, the revolutionary president,
what is the final takeaway? Because it's clearly
not a clean success story. No, it's not. Not
at all. If you look at the metrics, GDP, infrastructure,
poverty rates. Her scorecard is average at best,
maybe even below average. She'd factor in the
power crisis. But you look at the institutions,
it's a completely different story. She inherited
a country where the press was silenced, Congress
was a sham, the Supreme Court was in the dictator's
pocket, and elections were a joke. She left a
country where all those institutions, for better
or worse, were working again. Noisy, messy, often
gridlocked, but... She rebuilt the container
for democracy, even if the contents were still
chaotic and often disappointing. I mean, democracy
is inefficient. An authoritarian government can
build a bridge just by ordering it done. A democracy
has to debate it, bid it out, and vote on it.
The blackouts, the instability, the slow pace
of recovery, in a way, those were the price tags
of the transition. Which leaves us with a really
heavy thought to wrap this all up. We love the
stories of revolution, the walkouts, the human
shields on the highway, the dictator fleeing
in a helicopter. That's the movie version. But
the Cory Aquino story, when you really look at
it, asks a much harder question. Is restoring
democracy actually more difficult than fighting
for it? It's so much easier to unite people against
a common villain. It's incredibly hard to unite
them. for the boring, painful day -to -day work
of paying off old debts and drafting local government
codes. The revolution doesn't end when the confetti
falls. That's just when the real work begins.
And sometimes the person who wins the war is
the one who has to sacrifice their own popularity
just to survive the peace. A complex legacy for
a truly complex figure. That is our deep dive
on Corazon Aquino. Thanks for listening, and
we'll catch you on the next one.