Benigno Aquino III

Benigno Aquino III (born February 8, 1960, Manila, Philippines—died June 24, 2021, Manila) was a Filipino politician who served as president of the Philippines (2010–16) and was the scion of a famed political family.

He was the son of Corazon Aquino, who served as president of the Philippines (1986–92), and political leader Benigno Simeon Aquino, Jr.—themselves the children of politically connected families. The elder Benigno, an opposition figure to Pres. Ferdinand Marcos who was imprisoned when the younger Benigno was a child, was released and allowed to go to the United States in 1980. The following year the younger Benigno, after graduating from Ateneo de Manila University with a bachelor’s degree in economics, followed his family to Boston. His father returned to the Philippines in 1983 intending to challenge Marcos for the presidency but was assassinated immediately on arrival. The family nevertheless returned to the country soon afterward, and there the young Aquino worked for companies including Philippine Business for Social Progress and Nike Philippines.

He became vice president of his family’s Best Security Agency Corporation in 1986, the same year that his mother was named president of the Philippines after her opposition party successfully charged incumbent President Marcos with voting fraud. Aquino left the company in 1993 to work for another family-owned business, a sugar refinery. Finally, in 1998, he made the move to politics as a member of the Liberal Party, serving the constitutional maximum of three consecutive terms as a representative of the 2nd district of Tarlac province. During this time he also served as deputy speaker of the House of Representatives (2004–06), but he resigned from the post in advance of joining other Liberal Party leaders in making a call for the resignation of Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–10), who was accused of corrupt dealings including the rigging of the 2004 presidential election. From 2006 Aquino served as vice-chairman of the Liberal Party, and in 2007, at the end of his final term in the House of Representatives, he made a successful bid for a Senate seat.

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In September 2009 Aquino announced his candidacy in the 2010 presidential race. His mother, to many a symbol of democratic rule in the Philippines, had died the previous month, an event that heightened Aquino’s profile and served as a catalyst for his seeking higher office. Though his opponents for the presidency included such seasoned politicians as Joseph Estrada, who had previously served as president of the Philippines (1998–2001), Aquino was considered the front-runner from the time that he entered the race. In the elections held on May 10, Aquino won the presidency by a wide margin.

Aquino’s chief domestic accomplishment was the conclusion of a peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in October 2012. The deal promised a significant amount of autonomy to a Muslim-majority region of southern Mindinao and seemingly concluded four decades of deadly conflict. Economic growth in the Philippines was strong during Aquino’s administration, but unemployment remained high, and opposition politicians argued that the benefits chiefly accrued to the country’s elite. Aquino also faced criticism over his government’s slow response to Super Typhoon Haiyan, which killed some 8,000 people and displaced more than 800,000 when it hit the Philippines in November 2013. The most significant foreign policy issue of Aquino’s term in office was China’s increasingly assertive posture in the South China Sea. The Philippines sought a judgment from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague to clarify the ownership of a reef that was claimed by China despite the fact that it lay within Philippine territorial waters. Although the court later ruled that China had no claim to the reef and that China’s actions had constituted a violation of the Philippines’ sovereignty, China dismissed the decision. Limited to a single six-year term, Aquino supported Manuel (“Mar”) Roxas to succeed him in 2016. Roxas, the grandson of Pres. Manuel Roxas, represented the mainstream political establishment at a time when voters were clearly frustrated with the status quo, and he finished a distant second to inflammatory populist Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte succeeded Aquino as president on June 30, 2016.