Emilio Aguinaldo

Biography

Emilio Aguinaldo was born in 1869 in Cavite el Viejo (now Kawit), in Cavite province in the Spanish Philippines. He studied at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran until a cholera outbreak in 1882 ended his schooling, became his town's municipal captain while still in his mid-twenties and joined a Masonic lodge in 1895. When the revolution against Spain broke out in August 1896 he led the Magdalo faction of the Katipunan in Cavite and won early fights at Imus and Binakayan.

At the Tejeros Convention in March 1897 he was elected president of a revolutionary government that displaced Andres Bonifacio, who was executed by order of a revolutionary council of war that May. Pushed back by Spanish offensives, Aguinaldo set up the short-lived Republic of Biak-na-Bato and in December 1897 signed a pact with the Spanish governor-general under which he went into exile in Hong Kong in return for amnesty and an indemnity.

After the Spanish-American War began he returned on an American ship in May 1898, proclaimed Philippine independence on 12 June 1898 and, under the Malolos Constitution, was inaugurated in January 1899 as president of the First Philippine Republic. War with the United States broke out in February 1899; he turned to guerrilla warfare late that year, was captured at Palanan in March 1901 and swore allegiance to the United States in April.

He ran for president of the Commonwealth in 1935 and lost heavily to Manuel Quezon. During the Japanese occupation he collaborated with the occupiers, sat on their Council of State and urged guerrillas to surrender; he was arrested in 1945 and charged with treason, but the 1948 amnesty for collaborators ended the case. He later served on the Council of State under President Elpidio Quirino and died in Quezon City in 1964.