Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte said on Saturday she had ordered an assassin who would kill the president, his wife and the speaker of the House of Representatives if she herself was killed, in a brazen public threat that she warned was no joke.
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the elite Presidential Guard Force “for immediate appropriate action.” It was not immediately clear what measures would be taken against the vice president.
A government statement said:
“Acting on the vice president’s clear and unequivocal statement that she had contracted an assassin to kill the president if an alleged plot against her succeeds, the Executive Secretary has referred this active threat to the Presidential Security Command for immediate proper action. Any threat to the life of the president must always be taken seriously, more so that this threat has been publicly revealed in clear and certain terms.”
“No joke”
In a morning news conference, Duterte said she had spoken to an assassin and instructed him to kill Marcos, his wife and the speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives if she was assassinated, signalling a growing rift between the two most powerful political families in Southeast Asia. She noted:
“I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM (Marcos), (first lady) Liza Araneta, and (Speaker) Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke. I said, do not stop until you kill them and then he said yes.”
Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice presidential candidate in the May 2022 elections, and both won convincing victories while calling for national unity.
However, the two leaders and their camps quickly fell apart over key differences, including in their approach to China’s actions in the disputed South China Sea. In June, Duterte resigned from Marcos’ cabinet as education minister and head of the counter-insurgency body.
Like her equally outspoken father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president has become a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife Lisa Araneta-Marcos and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, an ally and cousin of the president, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and political persecution of the Duterte family and its close supporters.
Conflict hotspot
The trigger for her latest tirade was the decision by pro-Romualdez and Marcos House members to detain her chief of staff Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of obstructing a congressional investigation into possible misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary. Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and crying after learning of the plan to temporarily place her in a women’s prison.
The vice president is the daughter of Marcos’ predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose police crackdown on drugs when he was mayor and then president led to the deaths of thousands of small-time drug users being investigated by the International Criminal Court as a possible crime against humanity.
The former president denies authorising extrajudicial killings in the crackdown but has made contradictory statements. At a public enquiry before the Philippine Senate last month, he said he maintained a death squad of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao.
In the Philippines, the vice president is elected separately from the president and has no official duties. Many vice-presidents have been involved in public service and some have been appointed to cabinet positions.
