Security agencies in the Philippines have stepped up safety protocols after Vice President Sara Duterte threatened to have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr assassinated if she was killed.
Duterte, an ally of Marcos until recent months, made the threat on Saturday, as a rift between the two most powerful political families in the county widens.
“This country is going to hell because we are led by a person who doesn’t know how to be a president and who is a liar,” she said in the profanity-laced briefing broadcast on her Facebook page.
“Don’t worry about my safety. I have talked to a person and I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [Marcos], [First Lady] Liza Araneta, and [Speaker] Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke,” she said.
“I said, do not stop until you kill them and he said yes.”
Duterte made the statement in response to comments urging her to stay safe while she was in the House of Representatives, where her chief of staff was detained for failing to reply to questions on the alleged misuse of funds at the vice president’s office.
The vice president did not cite any threat against her.
The presidential communications office said Duterte’s remarks were being taken as a serious threat against Marcos.
“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,” it said in a statement.
“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,” it added.
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” against Marcos to an elite presidential guards force, which said it considered the Duterte’s threat, which was “made so brazenly in public”, a national security issue.
Duterte is the daughter of Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who is notorious for his crude language and a controversial war on drugs that is under investigation by the International Criminal Court.
She remained Marcos’s deputy after resigning from her post as education secretary in the cabinet in June, indicating a crack in their political alliance that propelled them to a landslide victory in 2022.
In October, Vice President Duterte told reporters that her relationship with Marcos had become so “toxic” that she sometimes imagines beheading him.
She also confessed that she felt “used” after teaming up with Marcos.
She threatened to dig up the remains of Marcos’s father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, from the national cemetery and dump them in the sea.
The political rift comes before mid-term elections in May, when Filipinos are to vote for new members of the House of Representatives, half of the Senate and thousands of local officials.
It will be a litmus test of Marcos’s popularity and an opportunity for him and his political allies to consolidate power.
Even though Duterte resigned from the cabinet, she remains the constitutional successor to the 67-year-old president.
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