Best president we never had
By Al S. Mendoza
THERE is the so-called best president that never was.
Ninoy Aquino was that.
He was being touted to succeed Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
But Ninoy got deflected by Marcos himself when Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972 that struck down the 1973 presidential election that Ninoy, then a senator, had been aiming for.
Marcos’ illicit political ploy allowed him to evade the mandatory end of his two-term tenure of four years each from 1965, when he won his first presidential mandate by beating Diosdado Macapagal (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s father).
More tragically, Martial Law scrapped the Constitution, abolished Congress and made Marcos a dictator, a position that gave him the unchallenged power to imprison Ninoy and other political foes—not to mention the critics to his one-man rule.
Wiped out was the entire Ninoy-led political opposition that included stalwarts Sen. Lorenzo Tanada, Jose Diokno, Jovito Salonga and Soc Rodrigo, Manila Times publisher Chino Roces, and nationalist Aquilino Pimentel Jr, among others.
Some of them Marcos had thrown behind bars together with student, worker, farmer and human rights activists—left to rot in jail mostly without charges filed against them.
For 14 years from 1972, Marcos ruled the country with an iron fist until he was deposed through the bloodless Edsa People Power revolution in 1986.
Banished to Hawaii, the lupus-stricken Marcos died there in 1989.
But by a stunning move that shocked the nation, Cory Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, the hesitant candidate that beat Marcos in the 1986 presidential snap election, allowed Marcos’ corpse back to our shores—together with the entire Marcos clan led by Imelda, Marcos’ widow.
Imelda did not bury Marcos’ remains and, instead, had her husband’s body embalmed and placed in a museum in the dictator’s home province of Ilocos Norte for public viewing any time of day.
To complete the Marcos’ resurrection, Imelda ran for president in 1992 and, as many pundits insist to this day, she might have won had Danding Cojuangco not run for the same post.
With Cory’s strong backing, Fidel Ramos won in the 1992 contest that involved several candidates, including Jovito Salonga.
Ah, Salonga.
Like Ninoy, whose 1983 murder at the Manila airport tarmac remains unsolved, Salonga was also often fondly referred to as the best president our country never had.
Salonga was appointed by Cory as the first head of the PCGG (Presidential Commission on Good Government), which was tasked mainly to chase Marcos’ ill-gotten wealth mainly deposited in Swiss banks.
After Cory’s death by cancer in 2009, a deluge of sympathy shoved her son, the late Noynoy, to the presidency in 2010.
Like Cory, Noynoy was also a hesitant candidate.
But not Grace Poe, who was in a hurry to become president that she defied experts’ counsel not to run for president in 2016.
She had been widely regarded as a shoo-in to win as vice president under Mar Roxas in 2016.
Instead, as fate would have it, Grace lost and Leni Robredo won as VP in 2016—the widow from Naga beating another Marcos.
In their rematch this year, however, with the nation’s top post up for grabs no less, the dictator’s son won—apparently, if not handily.
But that’s another story.
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