The betrayal of Ninoy and Cory
NINOY Aquino walked down the stairs of that plane in 1983 knowing the Marcoses might kill him. They did. Cory Aquino spent the rest of her life making certain the nation never forgot who fired the shot and why. Between them they gave the Liberal Party its soul and the country its founding creed: that the Marcoses were not opponents to be bargained with but the enemy of everything decent in Philippine public life.
Today the senators who inherited that party — who campaign on those names, who lay wreaths each August at the monument — have crossed to the Marcos side. There is no gentler word for it. They have betrayed Ninoy and Cory.
Remember what the betrayal is measured against. This is the party Ferdinand Marcos Sr. tried to decapitate at Plaza Miranda in 1971, the grenades shredding its senatorial slate on the stage. This is the party whose leaders he jailed when he padlocked Congress in 1972, whose leader, Ninoy, he held in solitary confinement for nearly eight years. The Liberal Party did not merely disagree with the Marcoses; they were its archenemy, and it built its entire postwar identity on that wound. For its senators now to steady a Marcos presidency is not a routine realignment. It is a desecration.
Marcos apologists are spreading the narrative that the control for the Senate was at best a “Senate-flix” drama and at worst, a shameful circus. However, the episode would not have happened if the three Liberal Party senators Kiko Pangilinan and Bam Aquino with their soulmate Risa Hontiveros had not joined the cabal of Marcos Jr. in the Senate.
On May 11 when Senate President Tito Sotto was ousted, the Marcos bloc was really a tiny one numbering only six: Lacson, Gatchalian, Sotto, the Tulfos and Lapid. This reflected the steep fall of Filipinos’ satisfaction with the Marcos administration, according to the Social Weather Stations poll, from a net +14 in November 2025 to negative 13 in March this year.
It was the three — Aquino, Pangilinan and Hontiveros — who increased the administration bloc to nine, making it easy for Marcos to expand it first to 11 with the two abstaining, fence-sitting senators, Zubiri and Ejercito, joining it, and later with the defection, after being intimidated, of Escudero and Villanueva to make it the 13-senator majority.
Ninoy
If the three had not betrayed Ninoy and Cory’s spirit and instead joined the five Duterte senators (Alan Cayetano, dela Rosa, Padilla, Go and Marcoleta) and their eight allies (Pia Cayetano, Escudero, Estrada, Legarda, Jinggoy, Villanueva and the two Villars) who ousted Sotto, the Senate would have had a solid 16 independent bloc, a full two-thirds of the Senate.
With that solid mandate, it would have gone on to undertake the investigation of the 18 ex-soldiers’ exposé that graft money from the ghost flood control scam were delivered by them not just to this administration’s minions but to the president’s family itself. Less than a week in office, the new Senate president Sherwin Gatchalian has declared that an investigation would be undertaken only if the ex-soldiers would produce new evidence.
The son of the dictator that their elders fought against for decades now counts the “Aquino bloc” — Kiko, Bam and Risa — among his loyalists, as much as Sotto, Lacson and the two Tulfos are.
Bam Aquino is the worst. He was Ninoy and Cory’s nephew — the son of Paul Aquino, Ninoy’s youngest brother and the very man who ran Cory’s campaigns in the 1985 snap election and the 1987 polls that consolidated her presidency. Bam even tried to look like Ninoy in the 2022 elections for chrissakes, wearing the same kind of eyeglasses the martyr wore. He now carries that name into every election and lets it do the work his own record cannot — and lends it to the steadying of a Marcos in Malacañang.
Kiko Pangilinan ran four years ago as Leni Robredo’s running mate on a ticket whose entire premise was stopping a Marcos restoration — and lost. Today both men supply the floor votes that keep a Marcos presidency stable and a Marcos succession plausible. They did not wander into this by accident. They chose it, deliberately, with their eyes open, and they have not had the decency to admit it.
Protest
Risa Hontiveros will protest that she is Akbayan, not Liberal. The card is a technicality. For 20 years, Hontiveros has been the most disciplined soldier of the Aquino order — marching under its banner, prosecuting its brief against Duterte’s drug war, standing on every camp-defining vote shoulder to shoulder with Aquino and Pangilinan.
If the Liberal Party is a creed, she is among its purest believers, more faithful to Ninoy’s memory in practice than some who carry his blood. Which makes her silence its own quiet treason: she, of all of them, knows exactly what is being abandoned, and she abandons it anyway.
A second betrayal, and in some ways the worse one: the cowardice of their silence. Not one of them has stood on the Senate floor and said plainly, “I am siding with the son of the man who jailed my elders, and here is why.” A party that once narrated every vote as a moral sacrament — the orations at the Ninoy monument, the invocations of Diokno, and Salonga and Tañada, the yearly sermons on “Never Again” — has gone conveniently mute the moment honesty would cost it something. Men and women confident in their principles explain themselves. These people hide.
They hide because the truth is squalid, and because an honorable path was available that they refused. This Senate could have had a genuine free bloc consisting of Duterte senators, the Aquino political heirs, and the independents like Loren Legarda, the Villars and Imee Marcos — senators who are nobody’s instrument, who vote the merits and not the camp, who answer to argument rather than to patronage. Kiko, Bam and Risa blocked such formation of an independent Senate.
They took the warm seat inside the administration column, where the chairmanships are dispensed with their additional compensations, and the budget insertions granted. They did not have to become Marcos’ minions. They volunteered, and they volunteered for the perks in the Senate and outside of it that Marcos can give them.
Danger
The three will tell you, if pressed, that the Dutertes are the greater danger now — that Marcos handed Rodrigo Duterte to the International Court of Justice to face charges of crimes against humanity that a Duterte restoration would bury, that the enemy of my enemy must for the moment be embraced. How could they be so dismissive of the fact that majority of Filipinos were so satisfied with Duterte’s administration that they gave him satisfaction ratings of at least 56 throughout his administration, and an amazing net +76 when he stopped down from office in June 2022? If the extrajudicial killings in his war against drugs included “thousands” of innocents, wouldn’t Filipinos have seen that and thus made him an unpopular president?
But notice they will only tell you this when pressed, never of their own accord, because to say it openly is to confess what the whole EDSA mythology was built to conceal: that the war between the Aquino establishment and the Marcoses was never the clash of good and evil it was marketed as, but a quarrel between two wings of the same propertied class.
When an outsider, Duterte, appeared — provincial and anti-elite — the establishment closes ranks, and the children of EDSA discover they can stand on the same barricade as the children of martial law, comfortably, as though what happened at the tarmac in 1983 had been a mere misunderstanding.
Note that these three senators, or for that matter the Yellows, never criticize the US, especially the installation of nine US military forward bases by Presidents Aquino and Marcos: the big sponsor of the Yellow movement from the start from 1985 has been the US, which sees the Dutertes as its enemy.
There is enormous shame for the three senators to become Marcos assets — and then lacking the courage even to say so. They have betrayed the very two people — Ninoy and Cory — whose names they will not stop invoking.
Yet all this may have a silver lining. The three have demolished whatever credibility the Yellows had remaining. Their defection to the Marcos camp is the final nail on the coffin of the Yellow movement, an elite-led, US-backed formation purported to reform society but refusing to confront the ruling class that benefits from it. Good riddance.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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The betrayal of Ninoy and Cory
Source: Breaking News PH
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