Fidel Ramos
Fidel Ramos was the general who broke with Marcos in February 1986, barricading himself with the defence minister Enrile in Camp Crame on the avenue where the crowds then came to protect them, and who six years later, in 1992, was elected president with twenty-four per cent of the vote in a seven-way race, the first Protestant to hold the office and the only one from the military, and gave the Philippines its best six years since independence: the power crisis of the Aquino years fixed, the telephone and airline monopolies broken, the growth that made the country a tiger cub before the Asian crisis, and the peace with the Moro National Liberation Front in 1996. He tried to have the constitution changed for a second term and gave it up when Cardinal Sin and Cory Aquino filled the streets again. He was born in 1928 into a political family of Pangasinan, a second cousin of Marcos, went to West Point and served in Korea and Vietnam, and was the chief of the Philippine Constabulary through the martial-law years, the force that did the arresting, which he answered for afterwards by saying he had followed the constitution. He was passed over for chief of staff in favour of Marcos's man Ver, and it was Ver's plan to arrest Enrile's reform officers that drove the two to the camps on 22 February 1986. Aquino made him chief of staff and then defence secretary, and he put down seven coup attempts against her, the last in December 1989 with American jets overhead. He won in May 1992 with her endorsement and 5.3 million votes against Miriam Santiago's 4.5. The presidency was managed by a general's staff work. A legislative executive council got the bills through, and there were the deregulation of banking, oil and shipping, the licensing of new power plants that ended the ten-hour blackouts within a year, the amnesty for the coup plotters and the communists, and the Jakarta agreement with Nur Misuari that made the MNLF chief governor of an autonomous Muslim Mindanao. The Asian crisis of 1997 caught the peso as he was leaving. He handed over to Joseph Estrada in 1998, chaired foundations and boards, was Aquino's and later Duterte's envoy to China, and died in Manila in July 2022 at ninety-four.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Filipino
- Roles: president, general, politician
