Philippine vice president publicly threatens to have the president assassinated

Philippine vice president Sara Duterte has said she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker if she herself is killed.

The country’s executive secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” against Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to an elite presidential guards force “for immediate proper action”.

“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,” a government statement said.

“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,” it said.

Running mate

Mr Marcos ran with Ms Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections and both won with landslide victories on a campaign call of 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. Ms Duterte resigned from Mr Marcos’s 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 Mr Marcos, his wife Liza Araneta-Marcos and House speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and second cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters.

Tirade

Her latest tirade was set off by the decision by House members allied with Mr Romualdez and Mr 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. Ms 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 Mr Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House speaker in expletives-laden remarks.

When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old lawyer 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 that 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.

Under the Philippine 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.

Armed forces

Amid the political divisions, military chief general Romeo Brawner issued a statement with an assurance 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,” Mr Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to break our bonds as Filipinos.”

The vice president is the daughter of Mr Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown when he was a city mayor and later as president 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 Philippine 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.