Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has vowed to “fight back” against the recent “troubling” threats against his life, after his Vice President Sara Duterte said she had hired a hitman to assassinate the president in the event of her own murder.
In a stern video message published yesterday, Marcos did not name Duterte but said that “such criminal plans should not be overlooked.”
“The statements we heard in the previous days were troubling,” Marcos said, as per Reuters. “There is the reckless use of profanities and threats to kill some of us.”
He added, “If planning the assassination of the president is that easy, how much more for ordinary citizens?”
Duterte made the threat in a livestream early on Saturday morning, in which she vented her anger against Marcos and his allies, and accused the president of incompetence. Her comments came after House lawmakers allied with Romualdez and Marcos ordered the imprisonment of Duterte’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez. Lopez has been cited in contempt for attempting to block the release of documents from the vice president’s office to a Congressional committee investigating Duterte’s alleged misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary.
During the livestream, when Duterte was asked about concerns over her security, she suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her, and then declared, “Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said ‘if I’m killed, you’ll kill [Marcos], Liza Araneta, and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke.”
Duterte’s remarkable comment, which could have been dragged from the script of a gangster movie, reflects the extent of her estrangement from Marcos over the past year. The pair formed a formidable partnership ahead of the presidential election of 2022, winning their respective elections in a landslide. However, the relationship has frayed over the past year over personal and political differences that have been amplified by the frequent insults and interjections of Duterte’s combative father, former President Rodrigo Duterte.
The feud entered a phase of open enmity in June, when Duterte quit her position as education secretary. She has since been subject to close legislative scrutiny of her spending as vice president and education secretary, at times responding with open hostility toward Marcos and his allies in the House. Her invective at the president has on occasion veered into violent musings, such as when she said last month that she had imagined cutting off Marcos’s head. She also threatened to exhume the body of his father, former President Ferdinand E. Marcos, from the National Heroes’ Cemetery and “throw it in the West Philippine Sea.”
The feud has also led the House to create a committee to investigate Duterte Sr.’s violent “war on drugs,” which resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings during his six years in office.
Despite Sara Duterte’s later attempt to walk back her death threat, the Marcos administration has pledged to take legal action “to protect our duly-elected president,” as Justice Undersecretary Jesse Andre said in a press conference yesterday. Andre announced that the National Bureau of Investigation would subpoena Duterte to explain her public threats against Marcos. There have also been suggestions from other quarters that Duterte could be impeached by Congress.
“The premeditated plot to assassinate the president as declared by the self-confessed mastermind will now face legal consequences and we are tapping our law enforcement agents to investigate on the whereabouts and identity of this person or persons who may be plotting against the President,” Andres said, according to Rappler. He added that failing to take legal action against Duterte would set a “very, very bad precedent.”
In any event, both political and legal imperatives dictate a strong response from Marcos. “The battle lines have been drawn,” Richard Heydarian wrote in a column today for the Philippine Inquirer. “Mr. Marcos will either have to respond decisively to repeated and direct threats from his former allies, or risk facing the music once he steps down from office.”
When they took office in mid-2022, many observers predicted that the Marcos-Duterte alliance was unlikely to last, but few would have expected things to deteriorate so rapidly and to such an extent. With more than three years until the next presidential election, and the legal and political challenges against Duterte and her father mounting, the Marcos-Duterte feud could well begin to reshape Philippine politics around a new axis.