ASSASSINATED BY the Marcos regime 20 years ago, Benigno "Ninoy"
Aquino Jr. had seemed, in the first 40 years of his life, a most unlikely
hero. Known before the martial law period as a glib, fast-talking
senator likely to be president at 40, nothing had suggested that he
would be other than just one more addition to the parade of traditional
politicians that had lorded it over the country since independence.
Born in 1932 into the political dynasty that had controlled the politics
of the Central Luzon province of Tarlac for decades, Ninoy Aquino
has been described as a politician who knew even from childhood what
he wanted to be, and that was President of the Philippines.
Aquino already knew the role the media could play in Philippine politics
long before the rise of politicians elected to public office through
exposure in television and film. His decision to interrupt his college
studies to pursue a high-profile journalistic career by covering the
Korean War in 1945 as well as other Southeast Asian countries has
been widely interpreted as an attempt to get into the national limelight
for the sake of a future career in politics. Only 22 years old, Aquino
was a young man in a hurry who knew what he wanted.
If calculation his pursuit of a journalism career was, it was one
that paid off, as the Manila Times, then the most widely circulated
newspaper in the Philippines, published his dispatches first from
Korea and later from Vietnam and Malaya to a readership to which his
byline became one of the most popular. Later he exclusively covered,
and also claimed credit for negotiating, the surrender of HMB (Hukbong
Mapagpalaya ng Bayan--the New Peoples’s Army forerunner, Army
for the People’s Liberation) leader Luis Taruc, thus boosting
his popularity further.
Aquino began his political career as the governor of Tarlac province
in 1963, or at the age of 31, and was elected a senator of the Republic
four years later (1967) at 35. From the Senate, where he soon became
one of the most visible members of the opposition (Marcos had been
elected President in 1965), the road seemed clear to the Presidency
of the Republic. Aquino rapidly became one of the most popular political
figures in the country by, among other calculated means, appealing
to the younger sectors of the electorate by taking up their most urgent
concerns.
In an era when surveys were almost unheard of, Aquino relied on public
opinion polls to guide him in discovering and addressing the issues
that most appealed to the majority of the electorate. Not only the
surveys guided him in the enterprise of stoking his popularity, however.
He also had the sound instincts for the public pulse of someone who
knew how to use current sentiments to his advantage.
This meant, between the years 1967 and 1972, active criticism of
Marcos, who soon enough knew that Aquino was fast rising as his worst,
because most popular critic. On the eve of the declaration of martial
law in 1972, Aquino, reelected senator in 1971, told an interviewer
that Marcos, for most of the electorate, had become the issue according
to the surveys he had commissioned, which was why it was as a critic
of Marcos that he was likely to gain the presidency.
There is almost no doubt that if the presidential elections of 1973
had taken place, Aquino would have won over any candidate from the
Nacionalista Party, the rival for power of Aquino’s own Liberals
(Marcos would have been disqualified from running by the 1973 Constitution).
Aquino reached that level of popularity through the usual paths of
cultivating a populist image through media that was both youthful
as well as businesslike and knowledgeable. It was a path his rival
Ferdinand Marcos had taken himself, and which included, among other
means, marriage to attractive, prominent women-- Aquino to Corazon
Cojuangco, and Marcos to Imelda Romualdez.
Aquino’s path to the presidency was blocked by Marcos’
declaration of martial law in 1972. But martial law was an event that
forced Aquino, the traditional politician who would be president,
into the thoughtful leader the opposition groups needed. One of the
first to be arrested upon the imposition of martial rule on Sept.
21, 1972, Aquino’s detention as a high security prisoner seems
to have given him not only the opportunity to read, but also to see
himself in a new, historical light as the most visible symbol of opposition
to martial rule, and as the political and social system’s last
hope for survival.
His being sentenced to death on charges of subversion in 1977, as
well as his leading the Laban ("Lakas ng Bayan"--The Nation’s
Strength) campaign for seats in the rubber stamp Batasang Pambansa
(National Assembly) in 1978 seem to have broadened his support further,
which could explain why the Marcos regime allowed him to leave in
1980 for medical treatment in the United States.
Once outside the country Aquino became the recognized leader of the
opposition to Marcos, but realized that it was in the Philippines
where his destiny awaited. He returned on Aug. 21, 1983, hoping to
prevent the total military takeover he believed would be likely in
the event of Marcos' death, but was instead assassinated at the Manila,
now the Ninoy Aquino, International Airport.
Aquino’s decision to return despite the risk of imprisonment
or death, and his subsequent assassination, made him both martyr and
hero, and sounded the death knell for the Marcos dictatorship. Although
it would take three more years before the collapse of the Marcos government,
his assassination in 1983 set into motion a series of events that
inexorably led to the regime’s collapse, and to the restoration
of the institutions of liberal democracy, in 1986. Warts and all,
Aquino was an authentic Filipino hero.
In addition to his martyrdom’s being an occasion for national
remembrance and celebration, Aquino’s story is also a lesson
in how great events can awaken the best instincts of the unlikeliest
of men and women. It suggests as well how the conventional concepts
of the hero as one born heroic and untarnished by human flaw are themselves
fatally flawed. To remember Aquino is thus to remember that the worst
of times can result in the best of responses.
