The WeddingsAtWork.com community joins the Filipino nation in praying for our former president in her battle with colon cancer.  May she be spared from more pain and suffering.

Cory Aquino, an icon of democracy, is the 11th president of the Philippines and the first female president in Asia. She’s is the widow of slain opposition leader, Ninoy Aquino.

Lots have been written about Cory & Ninoy, but only a few which covers their wedding, their marriage, and how their love for each other translated to love of country & fight for democracy.   Below is an overview of the story of their lives culled from various sources.

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Ninoy & Cory: a love story for country & democracy

Cory and Ninoy first met when they were nine years old. Their fathers were both congressmen and Jose Cojuangco was the godfather of Ninoy’s younger sister, Lupita.

Corazon Cojuangco lived her first six years in Manila and attended St. Scholastica’s College and the Assumption Convent. In 1946, the Conjangco family left Manila for the US.

Love began to blossom when Cory spent her summer vacation in the Philippines in her junior year. Ninoy was bowled over by the refined lady Cory had become. She admired his guts and knowledge of current events. “Ninoy was so confident,” says Cory. “He was somebody I found very interesting and I felt I would never be bored.”

Corazon married Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino, Jr. on October 11, 1954. Their 28-year marriage produced four daughters and one son. When the well-bred young lady gave up her law studies at the Far Eastern University to marry Ninoy, the sponsor at the wedding was Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay.

After they were married, there was so much excitement that she sometimes wished for some boredom. At twenty-two, Ninoy won the election for mayor of his hometown of Concepcion, despite being nearly three weeks short of the minimum age for candidacy. She was uncomfortable in her few public appearances. “I was basically a shy person and I really liked my privacy,” she recalls. “How can I be smiling and waving at people I don’t know?” On the last week of the campaign, the couple rode a carabao cart and then waded knee-deep through a swamp to get to a barrio. They spent the night in a hut that had an empty pineapple can as toilet. “It was really my baptism of fire,” says Cory whose upbringing was the classic, cloistered training in propriety that becomes a thoroughbred young lady of the upper classes.

Ninoy soon rose to be a governor of Tarlac, and was elected to the Philippine Senate in 1967. During her husband’s political career, Cory remained a housewife who helped raise the children and played hostess to her spouse’s political allies who would frequent their Quezon City home. She would decline to join her husband on stage during campaign rallies, preferring instead to stand at the back of the audience in order to listen to him. Nonetheless, she was consulted upon on political matters by her husband, who valued her judgments enormously.

Cory says of her full-time motherhood role: “If both parents had been busy doing their own thing, I’m afraid my children would not have grown up to be the responsible persons they are now. They are not the typical oligarch kids, into fast cars, expensive clothes, and drugs.” One family friend says that Cory herself gets the credit for that.

Ninoy soon emerged as a leading critic of the government of President Ferdinand Marcos, and there was wide speculation that he would run in the 1973 presidential elections, Marcos then being term limited. However, Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972, and later abolished the 1935 Constitution, allowing him to remain in office. Ninoy was among those arrested at the onset of martial law, later being sentenced to death.  On April 4, 1975, Aquino announced that he was going on a hunger strike, a fast to the death to protest the injustices of his military trial.

During her husband’s incarceration, Cory drew strength from prayer, attending daily mass and saying three rosaries a day. As a measure of sacrifice, she enjoined her children from attending parties, and herself stopped from going to the beauty salon or buying new clothes, until a priest advised her and her children to instead live as normal lives as possible.  The Military court found Ninoy guilty of all charges and he was sentenced to death by firing squad. However, Aquino and many others believed that Marcos, ever the shrewd strategist, would not let him suffer a death that would surely make Aquino a martyr.

In 1978, despite Cory’s initial opposition, Ninoy decided to run in the Interim Batasang Pambansa (Parliament) elections from his prison cell. She campaigned in behalf of her imprisoned husband and for the first time in her life, delivered a political speech, though she willingly relinquished having to speak in public when it emerged that her six-year old daughter Kris was more than willing to speak on stage.  Not surprisingly, Ninoy and all opposition candidates lost due to widespread election fraud.

In mid-March 1980, Aquino suffered a heart attack, possibly the result of seven years in prison, mostly in a solitary cell which must have taken a heavy toll on his gregarious personality.

On May 8, 1980, Imelda Marcos made an unannounced visit to Aquino at Ninoy’s hospital room in the Philippine Heart Center. She asked him if he would like to leave that evening for the U.S., but not before agreeing on two covenants: 1.) That if he leaves, he will return; 2.) While in America, he should not speak out against the Marcos regime.

Ninoy spent three years in self-exile, setting up house with Cory and their kids in Boston. Cory would later call the next three years as “the happiest days of her married life.”

Eventually, Ninoy decided to renounce his two covenants with Malacañang  because of the dictates of higher national interest. After all, he added, “a pact with the devil is no pact at all”.

So, in the first quarter of 1983, Ninoy was receiving news about the deteriorating political situation in his country combined with the rumored declining health of President Ferdinand Marcos. He believed that it was expedient for him to speak to Marcos and present to him his rationale for the country’s return to democracy, before extremists took over and make such a change impossible. He decided to return to the Philippines, fully aware of the dangers that awaited him.  It would have been perfectly convenient for the Marcos government if Aquino had stayed out of the local political arena, however Ninoy asserted his willingness to suffer the consequences declaring, “the Filipino is worth dying for.”

On August 21, 1983, he arrived Manila only to be assassinated at the tarmac of the Manila International Airport, which was later renamed in his honor.  Cory and their children  returned to the Philippines a few days later and led her husband’s funeral rites, where more than two million people were estimated to have participated, the biggest ever in Philippine history.

The martyr’s widow participated in many of the mass actions that were staged in the two years following the assassination of her husband. On the last week of November 1985, Marcos unexpectedly announced a snap presidential election to be held in February 1986.  The widow was seen as the only possible candidate who could unite the opposition and run against Marcos. Cory was reluctant at first to run for presidency. She eventually was convinced following a ten-hour meditation session at a Catholic convent.

The elections held on February 7, 1986 were marred by the intimidation and mass disenfranchisement of voters.

On February 22, the Filipino people held a mass uprising against Marcos and the People Power Revolution took place. On the morning of 25th of February, Cory took her presidential oath of office at Club Filipino in San Juan.

The relatively peaceful manner by which Aquino assumed the presidency through the EDSA Revolution won her widespread international acclaim as an icon of democracy.

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sources:

• Essential Cory Aquino (coryaquino.ph)
• About Cory: Growing Up (seattleu.edu)
• Corazon Aquino (wikipedia.org)
• Benigno Aquino, Jr. (wikepedia.org)