The Philippine vice president publicly threatens to kill the president and his family

Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte said Saturday she has contracted a hitman 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.

Lucas Bersamin, the country's executive secretary, referred the “active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to an elite presidential guard force “for immediate appropriate action.” It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against the vice president.

The Presidential Security Command immediately reinforced Marcos' security, saying it considered the vice president's threats, which were “so brazenly made in public,” as a national security matter.

Security forces said they were “working with law enforcement authorities to detect, deter and defend against all threats to the President and the First Family.”

Marcos was his vice-presidential running mate along with Duterte in the May 2022 elections, and both won in landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity.

However, the two leaders and their camps soon engaged in a bitter feud over key differences, including over their handling of China's aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos cabinet in June as education minister and head of a counter-insurgency body.

Like her equally outspoken father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president became an outspoken critic of Marcos, his wife, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Martin Romualdez, the president's ally and cousin, and accused them of corruption, incompetence and political violence. persecution of the Duterte family and its closest supporters.

Duterte's latest tirade was sparked by the decision by House of Representatives members linked to Romualdez and Marcos to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of seeking a congressional investigation into the possible misuse of her budget as deputy president and education secretary. Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and cried when she learned of a plan to temporarily incarcerate her in a women's prison.

At an online pre-dawn press 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 of Representatives, in expletive-laden remarks.

When asked about concerns about her safety, the 46-year-old lawyer suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her. “Don't worry about my safety because I spoke to someone. I said, 'If I get killed, you will kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,'” the vice president said. without elaborating and referencing the initials that many use to call the president.

“I have given my order: 'If I die, do not stop until you have killed them.' And he said, yes, the vice president said.

Under the Philippine Penal Code, such public comments may constitute a crime of threatening to harm an individual or his family, punishable by imprisonment and a fine.

Amid the political division, military chief General Romeo Brawner Jr. issued a statement assuring that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would remain impartial “with the utmost respect for our democratic institutions and civil authority.”

“We call for calm and determination,” Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to sever our ties as Filipinos.”

The vice president is the daughter of Marcos' predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose police-enforced anti-drug crackdown when he was mayor and later as president left thousands of mostly low-level drug suspects dead in killings investigated by the International Criminal Court. as a possible crime against humanity.

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