Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was born April 5, 1947, the daughter of Diosdado Macapagal, who served as the country's ninth president from 1961 to 1965. She studied economics at Georgetown, where Bill Clinton was a classmate, then taught at Ateneo de Manila - one of her students was Benigno Aquino III, who would later succeed her as president. She entered government in 1987 under Corazon Aquino, Benigno's mother, moved to the Senate in 1992, and became the first female vice president in 1998 under Joseph Estrada. When Estrada was accused of corruption she joined the opposition; the Second EDSA Revolution ousted him in January 2001 and she was sworn in as the 14th president. The Oakwood mutiny rattled her administration in 2003, but she won a full term in the contested 2004 election and abolished the death penalty in 2006, commuting over 1,200 sentences. She left office in 2010 and won a House seat representing Pampanga, serving as speaker from 2018 to 2019. In 2011 she was arrested on electoral sabotage charges, later dropped; in 2012 she was rearrested over alleged misuse of $8.8 million in lottery funds and held under hospital arrest until the Supreme Court acquitte