Security protocols in the Philippines have been stepped up after vice president Sara Duterte vowed to have the president assassinated if she herself were killed.
The daughter of the country’s previous president Rodrigo Duterte, the politician said she had contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker.
Speaking in an online briefing, she said: “I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [the nickname of Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr], Liza Araneta [the first lady], and Martin Romualdez [the speaker and the president’s second cousin]. No joke. No joke.”
The 46-year-old lawyer went on: “I said, do not stop until you kill them, and then he said yes.”
She was responding to an online commenter urging her to stay safe when staying in the lower chamber of Congress overnight with her chief of staff.
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.
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In October, Ms Duterte accused President Marcos of incompetence and said she had imagined cutting his head off.
The country’s executive secretary Lucas Bersamin described her latest comments as an “active threat” against the president and said an elite presidential guards force would prepare “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.
It went on: “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.”
The comments are the latest in a rift between Ms Duterte and President Marcos, who both hail from powerful political families in the Southeast Asian nation.
Former allies at loggerheads
Mr Marcos – who is the son and namesake of the late authoritarian leader – 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.
They have since fallen out over issues including their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea.
In June, Ms Duterte resigned from Mr Marcos’s cabinet as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body. She remains in post as vice president, which is elected separately from the president and has no official duties.
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Ms Duterte has accused the president and those around him of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting her family and her family’s supporters.
Their latest dispute has been over the detaining of Ms Duterte’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who has been accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of Ms Duterte’s budget as vice president and education secretary.
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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.”
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Mr Marcos’s predecessor, and the father of Ms Duterte, Rodrigo Duterte is well known for his police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown when he was a city mayor and later as president, which left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has been investigating as a possible crime against humanity.
Mr Duterte 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 Davao City.
The Philippines is gearing up for mid-term elections in May, with Mr Marcos’s six-year term ending in 2028.
