Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte listens as she attends a joint committee hearing of the House of Representatives in Quezon City. File.
| Photo Credit: AP

Philippine Vice-President Sara Duterte said on Saturday (November 23, 2024) she has contracted an assassin to kill the President, his wife and the House of Representatives Speaker if she herself is 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.

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

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

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 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 Mr. 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 by House members allied with 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.

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.

Amid the political divisions, military chief Gen. Romeo Brawner issued a statement with an assurance that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would remain nonpartisan “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.”

The Vice President is the daughter of Marcos’ 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 authorizing 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.

President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has ordered his government to strengthen its coordination on maritime security to confront “a range of serious challenges” to territorial integrity and peace, as a dispute with China escalates.

The order, signed on Monday and made public on March 31, does not mention China but follows a series of bilateral maritime confrontations and mutual accusations over a disputed area of the South China Sea.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on March 31.

Editorial |Troubled waters: On the tensions between China and the Philippines  

Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, a conduit for more than $3 trillion of annual ship-borne commerce. China’s claims overlap those of the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 said China’s claims had no legal basis.

The latest flare-up occurred last weekend, when China used water cannon to disrupt a Philippine resupply mission to the Second Thomas Shoal for soldiers guarding a warship intentionally grounded on a reef 25 years ago.

“Despite efforts to promote stability and security in our maritime domain, the Philippines continues to confront a range of serious challenges that threaten territorial integrity, but also the peaceful existence of Filipinos,” Mr. Marcos said in the order.

The President vowed on Thursday to implement countermeasures against “illegal, coercive, aggressive and dangerous attacks” by China’s coastguard.

His order expands and reorganises the government’s maritime council, adding the national security adviser, solicitor general, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency chief and the South China Sea task force.

The order appears to expand the role of the military by naming the Armed Forces of the Philippines, not just the navy, among the agencies supporting the council.

The renamed National Maritime Council will be the central body to formulate strategies to ensure a “unified, coordinated and effective” framework for the Philippines’ maritime security and domain awareness.

Mr. Marcos increased the number of agencies supporting the council to 13 from nine, including the space agency and the University of the Philippines’ Institute for Maritime Affairs and the Law of the Sea.