Ferdinand Marcos
By 1983 Marcos’s health was beginning to fail, and opposition to his rule was growing. Hoping to present an alternative to both Marcos and the increasingly powerful New People’s Army, Benigno Aquino, Jr., returned to Manila on August 21, 1983, only to be shot dead as he stepped off the airplane. The assassination was seen as the work of the government and touched off massive antigovernment protests. An independent commission appointed by Marcos concluded in 1984 that high military officers were responsible for Aquino’s assassination. To reassert his mandate, Marcos called for presidential elections to be held in 1986. But a formidable political opponent soon emerged in Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, who became the presidential candidate of the opposition. It was widely asserted that Marcos managed to defeat Aquino and retain the presidency in the election of February 7, 1986, only through massive voting fraud on the part of Marcos' supporters. Deeply discredited at home and abroad by his dubious electoral victory, Marcos held fast to his presidency as the Philippine military split between supporters of his and of Aquino’s legitimate right to the presidency. A tense standoff that ensued between the two sides ended only when Marcos fled the country on February 25, 1986, at U.S. urging. He went into exile in Hawaii, where he remained until his death.