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                                                                                January 5, 1987

Woman of the Year

Cory Aquino



Aquino Leads a Fairy-Tale Revolution, Then Surprises the World
with Her Strength


History, wrote Gibbon, is little more than a "register of
crimes, sorrows and misfortunes."  It is, equally often, a study
in black ironies or the fatal mechanisms of tragedy.  Sometimes
history is even a cautionary tale, an Aesopian fable on the
folly of blindness or greed or lust.  But history is rarely a
fairy tale, a narrative that instructs as well as inspires.
Still less often is it a morality play, in which the forces of
corruption and redemption, of extravagance and modesty collide
in perfect symmetry.

In 1986, however, as all the global village looked on, history
turned into a clash of symbols in the Republic of the
Philippines, a nation long relegated to its dustier corridors.
 There is the Southeast Asian archipelago of 56 million people
and more than 7,000 islands, life not only imitated are but
improved upon it.  In a made-for- television drama watched by
millions, two veteran rulers, President Ferdinand Marcos and his
wife Imelda, stumbled and fell in their ruthless campaign to
extend, with an immodesty broader than a scriptwriter's fancy,
their stolen empire.

During the final years of his "constitutional
authoritarianism," Marcos had effectively moved his country
backward--from democracy to autocracy, from prosperity to
poverty, from general peace to a widespread Communist
insurgency.  Treating the national treasury as if it were their
personal checking account, the royal couple had looted their
land of perhaps $5 billion.  "Here in the Philippines," said
Imelda, "we live in a paradise.  There are no poor people as
there are in other countries."  Even as she spoke, seven in
every ten Filipinos were living below the poverty level.

The sudden turn of fortune's wheel came when a confident Marcos,
who had never lost a vote in his life, called a snap election.
 He was thus hoping to satisfy the Reagan Administration's
demands that he become more democratic.  But Marcos' plans for
victory were upset by a slight, bespectacled mother of five, who
had entered politics only two months earlier.  When she went to
fill out her application for the presidency, Corazon Aquino had
nothing to enter under OCCUPATION but "Housewife."  The last
office for which the soft-spoken widow had been chosen was
valedictorian of her sixty-grade class.  In fact, her chief, if
not her only, political strengths seemed to be her innocence of
politics and the moral symbolism of her name.  In Spanish, her
first name meant "heart"; in Philippine politics, her second
signified "martyred opposition," in memory of her late husband
Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, once Marcos' chief rival, who was slain
on his return from exile in 1983, Cory Aquino, at 53, stood in
effect on a platform of faith, hope and charity.

The outcome of the allegorical battle seemed pre-scripted, if
not predestined.  Marcos, who had once been an effective and
even popular ruler, in recent years had gradually proved
brilliant enough to rewrite the rules and brutal enough to
enforce them.  On election day in February, in full view of more
than 700 foreign journalists, Marcos' men ripped up ballots,
bought others and intimidated voters at gunpoint.  As many as
3 million names were simply struck off the voter lists.

Then, suddenly, the implausible began to happen.  Thousands of
volunteer poll watchers, singing hymns and burning candles,
formed a human barricade against the armed goons and carried
their ballot boxes through the streets to counting stations.
Thirty of the government's vote tabulators walked out in protest
against the fraud. The country's Catholic bishops publicly
condemned the election, and the U.S. Senate echoed the protest.


Soon the implausible turned into the improbable.  Defense
Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, the architect of Marcos' martial
law, and Lieut, General Fidel Ramos, the deputy chief of the
armed forces, broke away from the government, claiming that
Aquino was the true winner.  As the rebels barricaded themselves
inside two military camps, first hundreds, then thousands, then
tens of thousands of common citizens poured into the streets to
offer food, support and protection, if need be with their
bodies, to the maverick soldiers and Aquino backers.  As
civilians, bearing only flags and flowers, took up positions to
defend the military men, the world knew that it was watching
more than just an electoral upheaval.

Finally, the improbable became the impossible.  Marcos' tanks
rolled toward the crowds, only to be stopped by nuns kneeling
in their path, saying the rosary.  Old women went up to
gun-toting marines and disarmed them with motherly hugs.  Little
girls offered their flowers to hardened combat veterans.  In the
face of such quiet heroism, thousands of Marcos loyalists
defected; many simply broke down in tears.

Less than 24 hours after Marcos had had himself inaugurated, he
was being helped off a plane in Hawaii, sickly, exiled and
bewildered. His former home, Malacanang Palace, was now a
melancholy tableau of abandoned power, overrun by thousands of
revelers.  The new leader of the Philippines was the reserved
housewife who had worn plain yellow dresses every day of her
campaign.  For her determination and courage in leading a
democratic revolution that captured the world's imagination,
Corazon Aquino is TIME's Woman of the Year for 1986.

Whatever else happens in her rule, Aquino has already given her
country a bright, and inviolate, memory.  More important, she
has also resuscitated its sense of identity and pride.  In the
Philippines those luxuries are especially precious.  Almost
alone among the countries of Asia, it has never been steadied
by an ancient culture; its sense of itself, and its potential,
was further worn away by nearly four centuries of Spanish and
American colonialism. The absence of a spirit of national unity
has also made democracy elusive.  Even Jose Rizal, a political
reformer shot by the Spanish and a national hero, called the
Filipinos "a people without a soul." Yet in February, for a few
extraordinary moments, the people of the Philippines proved
their bravery to the world, and to themselves.

Aquino's revolution with a human face was no less a triumph for
women the world over.  The person known as the "Mother of the
Nation" managed to lead a revolt and rule a republic without
ever relinquishing her buoyant calm or her gift for making
politics and humanity companionable.  In a nation dominated for
decades by a militant brand of macho politics, she conquered
with tranquility and grace.

By reviving the promise of democracy without bloodshed, all too
rare in the past, the Philippine revolution also held up a
candle of hope in some of the world's darker corners.  Moderate
South Africans, for example, could take some heart from the
success of civil disobedience; nor could they fail to note the
victory of a woman who was once her failed husband's ambassador
to the world, much as Winnie Mandela works in the name of her
imprisoned husband Nelson.  In overthrowing Marcos, moreover,
Aquino helped erase a whole volume of shibboleths.  She showed
that politics could be the art of the impossible; that force
could speak softly and carry a small stick; that religion could
be not the opium but the stimulant of the masses; that nice
guys, whatever their gender, sometimes finish first.

Aquino's triumph inspired many overhasty and wishful predictions
of sequels in Chile, South Korea or Pakistan to the Philippines'
"People Power."  None of those countries, however, suffer under
the conditions that ruled in the House of Marcos.  Their
economies are not in shambles, their corruption is far from
exorbitant, their armies remain unshakably loyal to their
military leaders.  The U.S., moreover, has shown no sign of
wishing to help push their strongmen out the door.

Yet the symbol remains.  After watc