Benigno Aquino III

Former Philippines president

BENIGNO AQUINO III, who has died at 61, was president of the Philippines from 2010 to 2016 and heir to a political legacy of a family that had been regarded as a bulwark against authoritarianism in that part of the world.

His father, the former senator Benigno Aquino Jr, was assassinated in

1983 while under military custody at the Manila international airport that now bears his name. His mother, Corazon Aquino, led the 1986 “people power” revolt that ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

The army-backed uprising became a harbinger of popular revolts against authoritarian regimes worldwide, and after her death in 2009 her son swept to power on a wave of public sympathy.

Although a scion of a wealthy land-owning political clan in the northern Philippines, Mr Aquino tried to fight poverty and frowned over excesses by the country’s other elite families.

But with more than 10m Filipinos working overseas, his economic boom failed to create enough jobs and many workers remained in poverty – their plight made worse by natural disasters such as the devastating Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, to which the government’s response was judged to be inefficient.

Aquino’s critics coined the term “noynoying”, a reference to his nickname Noynoy. The word translates as procrastinating.

Born in 1960 as the third of five children, he never married and had no children. An economics graduate, he engaged in businesses before entering politics. After his presidency, he stayed away from politics and the public eye.