MANILA: Philippine Vice President Sarah Duterte said Saturday that she is ready to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. if she herself is killed, prompting Marcos’ office to pledge “immediate appropriate action.”
In a dramatic sign of the widening rift between the two most powerful political families in the Southeast Asian country, Duterte said in an early morning press conference that she had spoken to an assassin and ordered him to kill Marcos, his wife and the speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives. House if you kill.
“I spoke to someone. I said, if you get killed, go kill BBM (Marcos), (First Lady) Lisa Araneta, and (Parliament Speaker) Martin Romualdez. Not a joke. Not a joke,” Duterte said, using profanities. Loaded briefing.
She said: I said: Don’t stop until you kill them, and he said: Yes.
She was responding to an online commentator who urged her to stay safe, saying she was in enemy territory as she was in the lower house of Congress all night with her chief of staff.
Duterte did not mention any alleged threat against her.
The Office of Presidential Communications responded with a statement saying: “Based on the Vice President’s clear and unambiguous statement that she had contracted an assassin to kill the President if an alleged plot against her succeeded, the Executive Secretary referred this active threat to Presidential Security.” Order immediate appropriate action.
She added: “Any threat to the president’s life must always be taken seriously, especially since this threat has been publicly revealed in clear and specific terms.”
Duterte’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the presidential office’s statement.
She said at the press conference: “This country is going to hell because we are led by someone who does not know how to be president and is a liar.”
Duterte, the daughter of Marcos’ predecessor, resigned from the government in June while remaining vice president, signaling the collapse of a formidable political alliance that helped her and Marcos, the son of the late authoritarian leader of the same name, secure their 2022 electoral victories by a wide margin. Footnotes.
Duterte’s outburst is the latest in a series of startling signs of discord at the top of Philippine politics.
In October, she accused Marcos of incompetence and said she fantasized about beheading the president.
The two families are at loggerheads over foreign policy and former President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, among other issues.
Previous political violence in the Philippines included the assassination of Benigno Aquino, a senator who strongly opposed the rule of Marcos Sr., as he exited his plane upon arriving home from political exile in 1983.