<div class="image-500">
<img loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-8/corys-mendiola.webp" alt="Mendiola massacre" />
</div>
<p>
Unknown to the general public, however, the late President Corazon C. Aquino's regime, compared with Marcos, was marked with a more gruesome record of human-right (HR) violations during her six years and four months of presidency, compared to that of Marcos over a span of 20 years. She unquestionably outperformed Marcos in this category.
</p>
<p>
Worse, human right advocates, mostly actually yellow loyalists and their leftist allies, who turned the explainable Marcos regime's records on human rights into a propaganda hyperbole to continuously demonize him, and who are mostly now at the forefront attacking President Duterte's relentless antidrugs campaign, using also HR issues, did not create even just a whimper of protest when Aquino was brazenly violating human rights.
</p>
<p>
The implication of this is that they are conveniently using the issue of human rights to divert pubic attention from their status quo, which President Duterte is now looking into, involving graft and corruption, plunder, narco politics and their own HR violations.
</p>


<p>
According to existing records in the United Nations, during Aquino's incumbency, respectable quarters in the world HR community ventilated the issue about her regime's despicable record of HR violations. The information contained in the Core Document on HR Violations of the Aquino Administration (1989), submitted to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, the Philippines's HR record had reached a "record low during the Aquino administration".
</p>
<p>
Between 1986 and 1992, the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP), at that time the leading, nonprofit HR organization in the country, documented the following:
</p>
<ul>
<li>
816 desaparecidos (the disappeared, or the victims of enforced disappearances)
</li>
<li>
135 cases of massacres (including the famous Mendiola carnage and the Hacienda Luisita massacre)
</li>
<li>
1,064 victims of summary executions (extrajudicial killings)
</li>
<li>
20,523 victims of illegal arrests and detention
</li>
<li>
1.2 million civilian victims of dislocations due to military operations
</li>
</ul>
<p>
These disturbing figures came about despite Aquino's creation of the Commission on Human Rights on May 5, 1987, through Executive Order 163.
</p>
<p>
Former Supreme Court Justice Abraham Sarmiento, one-of-four Philippine-based oppositionists who Ninoy said he admired the most, also drew attention to the massive HR violations under Aquino.
</p>
<p>
He noted that from 1988 onward, an average of 200 persons were arrested daily, with 94 percent of the arrests done illegally. He reported 4,408 political detentions in the 21 months from January 1989 to September 1990. Of those arrested, 535 showed signs of torture, 109 disappeared following their arrest, 218 people died from massacres, while 157 were wounded in 54 cases of frustrated massacres. It was estimated that from 1988 until April 1991, over 1 million people suffered injuries in the course of the government's counterinsurgency drive.
</p>
<p>
The Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates, in a report covering January 1987 to September 1991, stated that the rights of over 20,700 persons were violated, as a result of 18,281 arbitrary arrests, 701 involuntary disappearances, 1,000 extrajudicial executions and 727 summary killings. The Children's Rehabilitation Center also reported that in 1988 and 1989, the rights of 346,789 children were violated.
</p>
<p>
What do these statistics and figures tell us? The book Lost in Time noted:
</p>
<div class="article-comment">
<p>
"Aquino finally experienced how difficult it actually was to defend democracy. It was a lot easier to condemn her predecessor, Marcos, and to keep on ascribing to him problems that plagued her reign. To her dismay, the HR class suit against the Marcos Estate in America did little to spare her regime from intense criticism for its own HR record."
</p>
</div>
<p>
The nationalist, the late Renato Constantino, whose house was raided by government agents in August 1988, added:  
</p>
<div class="article-comment">
<p>
"The success of Mrs. Aquino's advisers in institutionalizing vigilantism, food blockades and other counterinsurgency measures shows us that ... the Aquino administration cannot keep up with its own rhetoric of upholding human rights, even in its narrow sense."
</p>
</div>
<p>
So, while the illusion created was that the Aquino administration is markedly different from that of Marcos, since it was not as politically repressive as its predecessor, this perception was accepted in a shrinking group of Cory believers.
</p>
<p>
Granting that Mrs. Aquino was sincere in her HR pronouncements, this was contradicted by factual record.
</p>
<p>
It would not be surprising, thus, if one day victims of HR violations will also seek to attach those of her surviving family, including parts of Hacienda Luisita, for compensatory damages similar to what was done by supposed Marcos's victims of HR violations.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Sources</strong>: 
</p>
<ol class="article-sources">
<li>
The human-rights issue by Cecilio T. Arillo, September 12, 2016 (<a href="https://goo.gl/XoqaS1" class="news_link" target="_blank" title="Source">Business Mirror</a>)
</li>
</ol>
<div class="source-notes">
<p>
(This article is adapted from the source listed above.  We are unable to grant permission for any kind of reproduction other than social media shares.)
</p>
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Gruesome human-rights violation record of Corazon Aquino's incumbency