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<img loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-9/cal-ninoy-aquino-sm.webp" alt="Ninoy Aquino" />
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(Ninoy Aquino, August 21, 1983)
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The Western press accused Marcos of ordering the assassination, but he did not stand to benefit. Indeed, his government was weakened by the accusations.  Congressman Stephen Solarz, a longtime Marcos foe who visited the Philippines in early September 1983,  called for an <i>"impartial"</i> investigation of the killing, warning of problems for the $900 million aid package in Congress.
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The State Department announced in warning tones that it <i>"trusts"</i> Marcos will launch a full and impartial investigation, thus acting, as one Washington source put it, <i>"like they acted with the Shah of Iran. They are nominally supporting him, but are in fact undercutting him."</i> During Secretary of State George Shultz's trip to Manila in June 1983, he told reporters on the plane that his subordinates would meet with opposition leaders, lest the United States be caught short, as in Iran, when Marcos falls or dies.
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<h3>
Philippines opposition
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Aquino was the most prominent of the opposition leaders against Marcos's rule; a decade of martial law ended only recently. The opposition movement ranges from the radical Maoists of the New People's Army and the Libyan-armed Muslim autonomy rebels in the Philippines' southern islands, to the Jesuit order and Cardinal Jaimie Sin, to right-wing plantation-owning families. The common denominator of all groupings is opposition to the president's efforts to industrialize the country.
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Aquino himself, though sentenced to death for an alleged political murder, was allowed by Marcos to leave the Philippines in 1980 in order to get a heart operation in the United States. Aquino remained in the United States as an instructor at Harvard, and later MIT. He was sponsored by Harvard's Jerome Cohen, a prominent figure in efforts to undermine modernization in Korea as well as the Philippines, and a major proponent of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski's <i>"China Card"</i> policy. Aquino was also in continual contact with the State Department.
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<p>
Despite warnings from the Philippines goverment and his own supporters that he might be killed, Aquino chose to return to the Philippines in order to ignite a mass campaign to bring down Marcos. He told friends on the plane that he might be killed but that he did not expect Marcos would be responsible. He suggested two other possibilities: either the extremists within the opposition movement trying to <i>"radicalize"</i> that movement, or else a faction of the army worried that Aquino would be the strongest contender for succession once Marcos dies.
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<h3>
Shultz's role
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<p>
Whoever planned the pulling of the trigger, the assassination of Aquino put pressure on the Marcos government, pressure abetted by the State Department and the IMF and World Bank. In opposition to the plantation owning oligarchic families, who wish to leave the Philippines a raw materials exporter, Marcos had developed an important, albeit flawed, program of industrialization. For example, in the 1970's almost all exports were primary commodities; in the early 1980's at least half were  manufactured goods. Marcos had pursued nuclear energy, hydroelectric and irrigation dams, and other big industrial construction projects.
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West's immediate reaction to the assassination of Ninoy Aquino on August 21, 1983