MANILA - Corazon Aquino, the Philippines' former president and heroine of the 1986 people power revolt that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, has died after a 16-month battle against colon cancer.
Here are five facts on Corazon Aquino.

* Corazon Sumulong Cojuangco was born on January 25, 1933, in a farming town in Tarlac province, north of the capital Manila, the sixth of eight children in a wealthy Chinese-Filipino family that owned a sugar plantation and bank.

* Popularly known as Cory, she attended a convent school in New York and completed a degree in French, with a minor in mathematics, at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, also in New York, in 1953. When she returned to Manila, she enrolled at a law school at the Far Eastern University, but quit a year later when she got married.

* She married Benigno Servillano Aquino Jr, a politician, and had five children, including Benigno Simeon Aquino who was elected senator in 2007 after serving nine years in the House of Representatives.

* In 1986, three years after her husband's murder at Manila's airport, she was swept into power by an army-backed popular revolt when election results were manipulated to keep dictator Marcos in power. Later the same year she was voted Time magazine Woman of the Year.

* After retiring from the presidency in 1992, she led street protests in 1997 to stop her successor from amending the constitution to remove limits on how long he could stay in power. In 2001, she helped topple the government of President Joseph Estrada, who was accused of corruption and mismanagement. In 2005, she called on President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to step down and apologized to Estrada last year for leading the uprising against his administration.

(Source: Reuters and www.coryaquino.ph)

(Reporting by Manny Mogato; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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