In 1986, a people’s uprising drove out Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos and replaced him by Corazon “Cory” Aquino. She ruled the Philippines from 1986 until 1992. Leading a popular movement is one thing — it can give you great acclaim. But it doesn’t necessarily translate to good statesmanship, something the Philippines was soon to find out. Many felt Aquino was barely even qualified to lead the country, her popularity primarily stemming from the outpouring of public sympathy for her after the assassination of her husband, which propelled her to fame.
It didn’t stop the world from lauding Aquino with praise. Excessive praise, dare I say. Cory Aquino was declared Time’s “Woman of the Year” for her efforts in toppling a regime many accused of having evolved into a dictatorship. So the expectation was for things to become better almost immediately. Thing is with sky-high expectations, it’s hard to live up to them… and Aquino man a ton of mistakes almost immediately. First of all, she freed all political prisoners her predecessor had jailed. This included convicted terrorists like Joma Sison of the Communist “New People’s Army”. Sison eventually fled the country but his comrades started killing Filipino soldiers and citizens indiscriminately. This is akin to a US president winning elections only to free every single terrorist still kept in Guantanamo Bay and letting them roam the countryside freely…
Aquino continued trying to be a peacemaker by giving Muslim extremists in the Southern Philippines their own autonomous region, which eventually developed in just another hotbed of terrorism that would continue to haunt her country’s citizens and armed forces for decades, claiming many lives. Determined not to let her predecessor have any praise even for the things he did right, Aquino began demolishing some of his major projects, closing a large nuclear reactor Marcos had built that would have given cheap energy to most of the country if it had began to operate.
Did Cory Aquino “ruin” the Philippines? I don’t think I would go quite that far. But she did present herself as the antidote to corrupt elites when she herself came from one of the richest landowning families in the Philippines. She claimed to fight corruption and desire peace but failed to end corruption, nor bring about peace…
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