speech writer of cory aquino

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• The Secretary

Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr.

Secretary of foreign affairs.

A lawyer by profession and a journalist by trade, Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr. holds a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School, and was publisher, editorial writer, and co-anchor and host of a number of national broadsheets and radio and TV news shows.  He was publisher of Today and Globe newspapers, host and co-anchor of TV shows Teditorial, The Assignment and Points of View, and co-anchor of radio shows Executive Session and Karambola . He was also editorial writer of the Philippine Press and writer of Interaksyon .

He had a brief stint in the academe as lecturer at the US National Defense College.

In government, he served as legal counsel and speechwriter to President Corazon Aquino, and speechwriter to Presidents Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. He was also elected to the Philippine House of Representatives, where he represented the First District of Makati City from 2001 to 2010.

He served as the 20th Philippine Permanent Representative to the UN, of which the Philippines is a founding member, succeeding a long line of distinguished diplomats such as Carlos P. Romulo.

He is married to Ma. Lourdes Barcelon Locsin and has four children.

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Corazon Aquino

Corazon “Cory” Aquino went from a shy law school student, to the first female president of the Philippines. Supported by the People Power Revolution, Aquino successfully ran a peaceful movement that eventually led her to become TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1986. The only other woman that received that honor at the time was Queen Elizabeth II in 1952.

Corazon Aquino was born on January 25, 1933 in Paniqui, Tarlac in the Philippines. Her birth name was Maria Corazon Sumulong Conjuangco. Her parents owned a sugar plantation and were one of the richest families in the area. The sixth out of eight children, Aquino focused on her studies and her Catholic beliefs. Her parents sent her to private school in the Philippines before she went to high school in the United States. She went to Ravenhill Academy in Philadelphia, and then attended the Notre Dame Convent School in New York. When she graduated in 1949, she began her undergraduate education at the College of Mount St. Vincent in New York City. In addition to speaking English, Tagalog, and Kapampangan, Aquino majored in French. She returned to the Philippines to attend law school at Far Eastern University. While in school, she met fellow student Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. and the couple got married. Soon after, Corazon left law school to raise their family.

Aquino’s husband Benigno became a prominent figure in politics and was elected as the youngest governor in the history of the Philippines. Shortly after, he was the youngest member of the Senate. He was known for opposing the political views of President Ferdinand Marcos and was expected to win the next election. However, Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972 that abolished the Philippine Constitution and allowed him to stay in power. Marcos then arrested Benigno and sentenced him to death. While still in prison, he remained active with the support of Corazon. Although she did not want him to run again while he was in prison, she decided to campaign on his behalf and deliver his campaign speeches. Although Benigno won the election, Marcos reportedly rigged the election so he could remain in power. Unfortunately, Benigno had to remain in prison. After years of imprisonment, President Jimmy Carter of the United States requested that Benigno and their family be released into medical exile in the United States. The Aquino family was allowed to move to Boston and lived there for three years. After regaining his health, Benigno decided to return to the Philippines to face Marcos again. However, as soon as Benigno stepped off the plane in the Philippines, he was assassinated.

Still in the United States with their children, Corazon Aquino became a widow at age 50. She returned to the Philippines and was greeted by people saddened by her husband’s death. An anti-Marcos political campaign began to protest the current presidential administration. In a movement called the “People Power Revolution,” Aquino participated in nonviolent and peaceful demonstrations against the current regime. Although she did not initially want to run, the Revolution encouraged Aquino to challenge Marcos for president during the next election. Marcos was confident that he still had the support of the people now that Benigno was dead and decided that Corazon was “just a woman.” He called an election in February of 1986 with Aquino as his opponent.

Representing change, Aquino chose yellow as her campaign color and thousands of citizens attend her rallies. On February 7, 1986 the election polls closed, and Aquino was believed to be the winner. However, when the official count was released by the government, Marcos was declared the winner. Believing she won the election but was cheated, Aquino and many citizens of the Philippines protested the decision. Marcos was friends with current United States President Ronald Reagan, who released a statement in support of Marcos. Although the protests were intense, Aquino and faith leaders encouraged peace agreements, so no one was shot or killed. After weeks of political unrest, President Regan convinced Marcos to retreat to the United States for exile. On February 25, 1986 Aquino was sworn in as the first female president of the Philippines. She served one term and restored the constitution during her presidency. However, not everyone agreed with her policies, and Marcos supporters tried to remove her from office many times. Aquino survived and was president until 1992. After her presidency, she continued to speak out against violence and homelessness in the Philippines.

In 2007, Aquino’s son Noynoy successfully ran for Senate with her support. A year later, she was diagnosed with cancer. On August 1, 2009, Corazon Aquino passed away. A few months later, her son was elected president of the Philippines. Unfortunately, she did not live to see him win.

• Engel, Keri. "Corazon Aquino, Revolutionary President of the Philippines." Amazing Women In History. June 09, 2019. https://amazingwomeninhistory.com/corazon-aquino-revolutionary-president-philippines/.
• Harvard Divinity School. "Corazon "Cory" Aquino." Religious Literacy Project. Accessed August 20, 2019. https://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/faq/corazon-“cory”-aquino.
• Iyer, Pico. "Woman of the Year." Time. January 05, 1987. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,963185,00.html.
• Nadel, Laurie.  Corazon Aquino; Journey to Power . Messner, 1987.
• Presidential Museum and Library. "Corazon C. Aquino." Accessed August 20, 2019. http://malacanang.gov.ph/presidents/fifth-republic/corazon-aquino/.  

PHOTO: Public domain.

MLA – Alexander, Kerri Lee. “Corazon Aquino.” National Women’s History Museum, 2019. Date accessed.

Chicago – Alexander, Kerri Lee. “Corazon Aquino.” National Women’s History Museum. 2019. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/corazon-aquino.

• Scariano, Margaret.  The Picture Life of Corazon Aquino . New York: F. Watts, 1987.
• TIME. "Corazon Aquino's Life in Photos - Photo Essays." http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1914109,00.html.

Related Biographies

Stacey abrams, abigail smith adams, toshiko akiyoshi, june almeida, related background, mary church terrell , belva lockwood and the precedents she set for women’s rights, educational equality & title ix:, the women of a special triad (title ix, the aiaw, the wbl).

Speech before the joint session of the United States Congress - Sept. 18, 1986

Mr. Speaker, Senator Thurmond, Distinguished members of Congress.

Three years ago I left America in grief, to bury my husband, Ninoy Aquino. I thought I had left it also, to lay to rest his restless dream of Philippine freedom. Today, I have returned as the President of a free people.

In burying Ninoy, a whole nation honored him by that brave and selfless act of giving honor to a nation in shame recovered its own. A country that had lost faith in its future, founded in a faithless and brazen act of murder. So, in giving we receive, in losing we find, and out of defeat we snatched our victory. For the nation, Ninoy became the pleasing sacrifice that answered their prayers for freedom.

For myself and our children, Ninoy was a loving husband and father. His loss, three times in our lives was always a deep and painful one. Fourteen years ago this month, was the first time we lost him. A president-turned-dictator and traitor to his oath, suspended the constitution and shutdown the Congress that was much like this one before which I'm honored to speak. He detained my husband along with thousands of others - Senators, publishers, and anyone who had spoken up for the democracy as its end drew near. But for Ninoy, a long and cruel ordeal was reserved. The dictator already knew that Ninoy was not a body merely to be imprisoned but a spirit he must break. For even as the dictatorship demolished one-by-one; the institutions of democracy, the press, the congress, the independence of a judiciary, the protection of the Bill of Rights, Ninoy kept their spirit alive in himself.

The government sought to break him by indignities and terror. They locked him up in a tiny, nearly airless cell in a military camp in the north. They stripped him naked and held a threat of a sudden midnight execution over his head. Ninoy held up manfully under all of it. I barely did as well. For forty-three days, the authorities would not tell me what had happened to him. This was the first time my children and I felt we had lost him.

When that didn't work, they put him on trial for subversion, murder and a host of other crimes before a military commission. Ninoy challenged its authority and went on a fast. If he survived it, then he felt God intended him for another fate. We had lost him again. For nothing would hold him back from his determination to see his fast through to the end. He stopped only when it dawned on him that the government would keep his body alive after the fast had destroyed his brain. And so, with barely any life in his body, he called off the fast on the 40th day. God meant him for other things, he felt. He did not know that an early death would still be his fate, that only the timing was wrong. At any time during his long ordeal, Ninoy could have made a separate peace with a dictatorship as so many of his countrymen had done. But the spirit of democracy that inheres in our race and animates this chamber could not be allowed to die. He held out in the loneliness of his cell and the frustration of exile, the democratic alternative to the insatiable greed and mindless cruelty of the right and the purging holocaust of the left.

And then, we lost him irrevocably and more painfully than in the past. The news came to us in Boston. It had to be after the three happiest years of our lives together. But his death was my country's resurrection and the courage and faith by which alone they could be free again. The dictator had called him a nobody. Yet, two million people threw aside their passivity and fear and escorted him to his grave.

And so began the revolution that has brought me to democracy's most famous home, The Congress of the United States.

The task had fallen on my shoulders, to continue offering the democratic alternative to our people. Archibald Macleish had said that democracy must be defended by arms when it is attacked by arms, and with truth when it is attacked by lies. He failed to say how it shall be won. I held fast to Ninoy's conviction that it must be by the ways of democracy. I held out for participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship called, even if I knew it would be rigged. I was warned by the lawyers of the opposition, that I ran the grave risk of legitimizing the foregone results of elections that were clearly going to be fraudulent. But I was not fighting for lawyers but for the people in whose intelligence, I had implicit faith. By the exercise of democracy even in a dictatorship, they would be prepared for democracy when it came. And then also, it was the only way I knew by which we could measure our power even in the terms dictated by the dictatorship. The people vindicated me in an election shamefully marked by government thuggery and fraud. The opposition swept the elections, garnering a clear majority of the votes even if they ended up (thanks to a corrupt Commission on Elections) with barely a third of the seats in Parliament. Now, I knew our power.

Last year, in an excess of arrogance, the dictatorship called for its doom in a snap election. The people obliged. With over a million signatures they drafted me to challenge the dictatorship. And I, obliged.

The rest is the history that dramatically unfolded on your television screens and across the front pages of your newspapers. You saw a nation armed with courage and integrity, stand fast by democracy against threats and corruption. You saw women poll watchers break out in tears as armed goons crashed the polling places to steal the ballots. But just the same, they tied themselves to the ballot boxes. You saw a people so committed to the ways of democracy that they were prepared to give their lives for its pale imitation. At the end of the day before another wave of fraud could distort the results, I announced the people's victory.

Many of you here today played a part in changing the policy of your country towards ours. We, the Filipinos thank each of you for what you did. For balancing America's strategic interest against human concerns illuminates the American vision of the world. The co-chairman of the United States observer team, in his report to the President said, "I was witness to an extraordinary manifestation of democracy on the part of the Filipino people. The ultimate result was the election of Mrs. Corazon Aquino as President and Mr. Salvador Laurel as Vice-President of the Philippines ."

When a subservient parliament announced my opponent's victory, the people then turned out in the streets and proclaimed me the President of all the people. And true to their word, when a handful of military leaders declared themselves against the dictatorship, the people rallied to their protection. Surely, the people take care of their own. It is on that faith and the obligation it entails that I assumed the Presidency.

As I came to power peacefully, so shall I keep it. That is my contract with my people and my commitment to God. He had willed that the blood drawn with a lash shall not in my country be paid by blood drawn by the sword but by the tearful joy of reconciliation. We have swept away absolute power by a limited revolution that respected the life and freedom of every Filipino.

Now, we are restoring full constitutional government. Again as we restore democracy by the ways of democracy, so are we completing the constitutional structures of our new democracy under a constitution that already gives full respect to the Bill of Rights. A jealously independent constitutional commission is completing its draft which will be submitted later this year to a popular referendum. When it is approved, there will be elections for both national and local positions. So, within about a year from a peaceful but national upheaval that overturned a dictatorship, we shall have returned to full constitutional government.

Given the polarization and breakdown we inherited, this is no small achievement. My predecessor set aside democracy to save it from a communist insurgency that numbered less than five hundred. Unhampered by respect for human rights he went at it with hammer and tongs. By the time he fled, that insurgency had grown to more than sixteen thousand. I think there is a lesson here to be learned about trying to stifle a thing with a means by which it grows. I don't think anybody in or outside our country, concerned for a democratic and open Philippines doubts what must be done. Through political initiatives and local re-integration programs, we must seek to bring the insurgents down from the hills and by economic progress and justice, show them that which the best-intentioned among them fight. As president among my people, I will not betray the cause of peace by which I came to power. Yet, equally and again, no friend of Filipino democracy will challenge this. I will not stand by and allow an insurgent leadership to spurn our offer of peace and kill our young soldiers and threaten our new freedom.

Yet, I must explore the path of peace to the utmost. For at its end, whatever disappointment I meet there is the moral basis for laying down the Olive branch of peace and taking up the sword of war.

Still, should it come to that, I will not waiver from the course laid down by your great liberator.

"With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds. To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and for his orphans to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Like Abraham Lincoln, I understand that force may be necessary before mercy. Like Lincoln, I don't relish it. Yet, I will do whatever it takes to defend the integrity and freedom of my country.

Finally may I turn to that other slavery, our twenty-six billion dollar foreign debt. I have said that we shall honor it. Yet, the means by which we shall be able to do so are kept from us. Many of the conditions imposed on the previous government that stole this debt, continue to be imposed on us who never benefited from it.

And no assistance or liberality commensurate with the calamity that was vested on us have been extended. Yet ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever. With little help from others, we Filipinos fulfilled the first and most difficult condition of the debt negotiation, the full restoration of democracy and responsible government. Elsewhere and in other times, a more stringent world economic conditions, marshal plans and their like were felt to be necessary companions of returning democracy.

When I met with President Reagan, we began an important dialogue about cooperation and the strengthening of friendship between our two countries. That meeting was both a confirmation and a new beginning. I am sure it will lead to positive results in all areas of common concern. Today, we face the aspiration of a people who have known so much poverty and massive unemployment for the past 14 years. And yet offer their lives for the abstraction of democracy.

Wherever I went in the campaign, slum area or impoverished village. They came to me with one cry, DEMOCRACY. Not food although they clearly needed it but DEMOCRACY. Not work, although they surely wanted it but DEMOCRACY. Not money, for they gave what little they had to my campaign. They didn't expect me to work a miracle that would instantly put food into their mouths, clothes on their back, education in their children and give them work that will put dignity in their lives. But I feel the pressing obligation to respond quickly as the leader of the people so deserving of all these things.

We face a communist insurgency that feeds on economic deterioration even as we carry a great share of the free world defenses in the Pacific. These are only two of the many burdens my people carry even as they try to build a worthy and enduring house for their new democracy. That may serve as well as a redoubt for freedom in Asia. Yet, no sooner as one stone laid than two are taken away. Half our export earnings, two billion dollars out of four billion dollars which is all we can earn in the restrictive market of the world, must go to pay just the interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people never received.

Still we fought for honor and if only for honor, we shall pay. And yet, should we have to ring the payments from the sweat of our men's faces and sink all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two-hundred fifty years of unrequited toil. Yet, to all Americans, as the leader to a proud and free people, I address this question, "Has there been a greater test of national commitment to the ideals you hold dear than that my people have gone through? You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here, you have a people who want it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it."

Three years ago I said, Thank you America for the haven from oppression and the home you gave Ninoy, myself and our children and for the three happiest years of our lives together. Today I say, join us America as we build a new home for democracy; another haven for the oppressed so it may stand as a shining testament of our two nations' commitment to freedom.

Speech taken from http://chuvachienes.com/2009/07/31/complete-transcript-of-president-corazon-c-aquinos-speech-before-us-congress/

AmericanRhetoric.com. "Corazon Aquino - U.S. Congress Speech (Audio Enhanced)." YouTube video, 24:52. Aug. 18, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bavnuT4RlU .

Aquino, Corazon C. 1986. "Speech of President Corazon Aquino during the Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, September 18, 1986." Official Gazette. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1986/09/18/speech-of-president-corazon-aquino-during-the-joint-session-of-the-u-s-congress-september-18-1986 .

Neither the Catt Center nor Iowa State University is affiliated with any individual in the Archives or any political party. Inclusion in the Archives is not an endorsement by the center or the university.

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Spokesperson for whom?

I recall the speech of President Cory Aquino, prepared by Teddy Locsin, before the US Congress immediately following her ascension to the presidency.

Poignantly written, it spoke of our national honor, snatched from a despicable dictatorial regime: Aquino’s supreme sacrifice allowed “a nation in shame to recover its honor.”

The speech vividly showed Locsin’s ineluctable abhorrence for any act aimed at disparaging not only a person’s honor but also his own country’s.

However, in his recent Twitter comment, Locsin changed my view of him.

It involves a lady foreign national throwing “taho” at a policeman who was assisting MRT personnel in checking passengers’ bags for liquids.

Police authorities charged the foreigner for several offenses, among them, direct assault, disobedience to authority and unjust vexation.

What a dismay that Locsin, in his comment, simply dismissed the incident as trivial, claiming that “this can happen anywhere, to anyone in any country.”

If, to Locsin, throwing taho or any form of liquid for that matter, at a uniformed personnel while in the performance of his duty is considered trivial, is he not teaching our citizens, and more importantly our youth, wrong values, manners and conduct?

Before we even speak of honor and love of country — the core of Cory’s speech that Locsin wrote passionately — we should first learn not to allow anyone to degrade or debase our own personal honor and integrity.

May we know for whose country Locsin speaks?

BENJIE GUERRERO, [email protected]

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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Cory aquino's historic speech before the u.s. congress, 4 comments:.

wonderful and eloquent speech. thanks for the reminder, Ivan. i've never seen this before. i was too young then. i do hope Tita Cory's passing will reignite our spirit to build a better country. thank you Tita Cory for your courage and sacrifice.

i wasnt born yet then, but it was really a great speech. talk about a US visit! i feel sad for our country that we always have moments of greatness and hope but we can't always seem to follow through. stark contrast with GMAs photo-op with obama which was barely noticed by americans. there is a great difference between politicians who seek glory for themselves and leaders who give glory to the nation.

ITS A SAD DAY, BUT IM OPTIMISTIC WE'LL STAY LIKE THE SMARTASSES THAT WE ARE... =) I HOPE WE ALL BECOME BETTER PEOPLE BECAUSE OF HER HI THERE! WUT U DOIN?! :) http://www.kumagcow.com VISIT ME TODAY PLEASE!

Have been watching this for like 20times alraedy and still proud of her and pinoy everytime I do so. She has the charisma that even the Americans are enthralled. Her leagcy shall always live with us.

MikeLigalig.com

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