Benigno Aquino Jr.
Benigno Aquino was the youngest senator in the history of the Philippines and the man expected to succeed Marcos until Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and jailed him for seven years, and when he came home from exile in August 1983 he was shot in the head on the airport tarmac before his feet touched the ground; the funeral of two million and the widow who took his place ended the dictatorship three years later, and the airport has his name. He was born in 1932 into the landowning political family of Tarlac, was a war correspondent in Korea at seventeen, the youngest mayor, governor and senator the country had had, and by 1971 the Liberal party's presidential prospect for 1973, when Marcos's second term would end. On the night of 21 September 1972 he was the first man arrested. He spent seven years and seven months in a military cell, forty days of it on hunger strike, was tried by a military court for murder and subversion and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1977, a sentence Marcos did not carry out. In 1980 he was allowed to leave for heart surgery in Texas. The three years at Harvard and MIT made him the opposition's voice abroad, and in 1983, with Marcos ill and the regime's succession open, he decided to go home against every warning, including the first lady's. He flew in on a China Airlines flight on 21 August wearing a bulletproof vest, was taken off by soldiers at the door, and was shot on the service stairs. A man the soldiers then killed was named as the assassin. The commission the regime appointed found the military responsible, the court the regime controlled acquitted the general and the twenty-five soldiers, and the court after the regime convicted sixteen of them. Corazon Aquino ran against Marcos in the snap election of 1986 on nothing but his name, and People Power on the highway put her in the palace. The words on the monument are his: the Filipino is worth dying for.
- Lived: 1932 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: Filipino
- Roles: senator, politician
