There is a double edge to the mourning of Filipinos for the death of their first democratically elected president, Corazon Aquino. There is the obvious regret at the passing of the wife of the murdered Benigno Aquino, slain in 1983 as he arrived to challenge the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. With considerable reluctance, three years later, Corazon took up her husband's political mantle and, with Cardinal Jaime Sin, led the remarkable people-power revolution that drove Marcos from power.
Confirmed as president by an overwhelming popular vote, “Tita (Auntie) Cory” as she was known carried with her massive expectations for economic and social reform for a country that had been long and ruthlessly ruled by a small and powerful elite gathered around the Marcos family. Unfortunately, Aquino herself was from that same elite and her early attempts at land reform were even opposed by members of her own family.
It was argued at the time that she had a sufficiently powerful mandate to drive through the necessary changes. The professional classes backed her as did the many poor who believed now that the hated Marcos regime had gone, social and economic justice could be achieved by a sweep of the presidential pen.
It was of course never going to be that simple but Aquino’s essential lack of political savvy made the job altogether more difficult. Having cleverly united the two main opposition parties to challenge Marcos in an election, she appeared to lose her touch. She also came under immense personal pressure to water down her policies from members of the old Marcos elite, some of whom remained in the National Assembly. It may have been this, coupled with her essential niceness, that caused her to become paralyzed by indecision. There was also a series of failed military coups, by both Marcos diehards and disaffected army officers.
Her inability to act firmly and quickly against extensive vested interests meant that in the end her presidency was a failure. She herself seemed to acknowledge this when in 1992 she refused to stand for a second term. She had not enjoyed the trappings of office and was disillusioned by the refusal of those who held the economic reins of power to loosen them to any meaningful degree. Yet she remained an influential and much revered figure. She played a leading role in the ouster of the debauched and corrupt actor-president Joseph Estrada and, more recently, led protests against Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's constitutional change plans and the continued corruption within her government. In truth, extensive venality is the deadly inheritance of the Marcos years and it has yet to be eliminated. Aquino herself hated corruption and was never even suspected of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, she was incapable of ripping payola from the body politic, even among her own supporters.
It is therefore not simply for the woman who led them to democratic freedom that Filipinos are now shedding tears. Their second cause for mourning is the grievously lost opportunity that her presidency represented. The country still awaits the leader who will finish the job she began.
