The Philippines VP publicly threatens to have the president assassinated

Manila: The Philippines Vice President Sara Duterte said she had contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker if she herself was killed, in a brazen public threat that she warned was not a joke.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to an elite presidential guards force “for immediate proper action”. It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against the vice president.

Vice President Sara Duterte’s threat was taken seriously, though she later tried to walk back the remarks.Credit: AP

The Presidential Security Command boosted Marcos’ security and said it considered the vice president’s threat, which was “made so brazenly in public”, a national security issue.

The presidential security force said it was “co-ordinating with law enforcement agencies to detect, deter, and defend against any and all threats to the president and the first family.”

Duterte, a lawyer, later tried to walk back her remarks and said they were not an actual threat but only an expression of concern over an unspecified threat to her own life.

“If I expressed the concern, they will say that’s a threat to the life of the president?” she said.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his wife Louise Araneta.Credit: AP

“Why would I kill him if not for revenge from the grave? There is no reason for me to kill him. What’s the benefit for me?” Duterte told journalists.

Under the Philippines penal code, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or his family and is punishable by a jail term and fine.

The Philippines Constitution says that if a president dies, sustains a permanent disability, is removed from office or resigns, the vice president takes over and serves the rest of the term.

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections and both won with landslide victories after a campaign calling for national unity.

The two leaders and their camps, however, rapidly had a bitter falling-out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body.

Like her equally outspoken father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife Liza Araneta Marcos and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters.

Her latest tirade was set off by the decision of House members allied to Romualdez and Marcos’ to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary. Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and wept when she heard of a plan to temporarily lock her up in a women’s prison.

In a pre-dawn online news conference, an angry Sara Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House speaker in expletives-laden remarks.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr poses with Vice President Sara Duterte after his swearing-in ceremony in 2022.Credit: Getty

When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her. “Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said, ‘If I’m killed, you’ll kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,’” the vice president said without elaborating and using the initials many use to call the president.

“I’ve given my order, ‘If I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them’. And he said, ‘Yes’,” the vice president said.

Amid the political divisions, military chief General Romeo Brawner issued a statement assuring that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would remain non-partisan “with utmost respect for our democratic institutions and civilian authority”.

“We call for calm and resolve,” Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to break our bonds as Filipinos.”

Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos’ predecessor and the vice president’s father, was behind a police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown as a city mayor and later as president that left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has been investigating as a possible crime against humanity.

The former president denied authorising extrajudicial killings under his crackdown but has given conflicting statements. He told a public Senate inquiry last month that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of southern Davao city.

AP

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