The Vice President of the Philippines publicly threatens to have President Marcos assassinated

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippines Vice President Sara Duterte said Saturday that she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the speaker of the House of Representatives if she herself is 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 an elite presidential guard force “for immediate proper action.” It was not immediately clear what action would be taken against the vice president.

The Presidential Security Command immediately increased Marcos’ security, saying it considered the vice president’s threat, which was “made so brazenly in public,” a national security concern.

The security force said it is “coordinating with law enforcement agencies to detect, deter and defend against any and all threats against the president and the first family.”

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential candidate in the May 2022 election and both won landslide victories on a campaign call for national unity.

However, the two leaders and their camps soon had a bitter fallout over important 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 agency.

Like her equally outspoken father, fhv President Rodrigo Dutertebecame vice-chairman 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 political persecution by the Duterte family and its close supporters.

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

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

When asked about concerns for her safety, the 46-year-old lawyer suggested there was an unspecified plan to kill her. “Don’t worry about my safety because I have spoken to someone. I said ‘if I get killed, you kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,'” the vice president said without elaborating and using the initials, which many use to call the president.

“I have given my order: ‘If I die, don’t stop until you kill them.’ And he said, ‘yes,'” the vice president said.

Under the Philippine Penal Code, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threats to harm a person or his family, punishable by imprisonment and a fine.

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

“We’re calling for calm and determination,” Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who would try to break our bond as Filipinos.”

The vice president is the daughter of Marcos’ predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose police-enforced anti-narcotics crackdown when he was city mayor and later as president left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead, who International Criminal Court has been investigated as a possible crime against humanity.

The former president denied authorizing extrajudicial killings during his crackdown, but has given contradictory statements. He told a public inquiry by the Philippine Senate last month that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of southern Davao.