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Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte yesterday denied planning to kill the president, just hours after the administration said that she could face criminal charges for threatening his assassination.
During a livestream on Saturday, Duterte alleged that there was a plot against her own life, and that she had hired someone to kill President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his wife, and cousin Martin Romualdez, the speaker of the House of Representatives, in the event of her murder.
Speaking with reporters yesterday, Duterte said that her comments were taken out of context and reiterated that her “plan” was conditioned upon her own death by assassination.
“My question now to the administration: Is revenge from the grave a crime?” she said. “Common sense should be enough for us to understand and accept that a supposed conditional act of revenge does not constitute an active threat. This is a plan without flesh.”
Duterte added that she had only made the comments in a fit of rage with the president, with whom she has been locked in a bitter feud for more than a year. She criticized the Marcos administration’s “failure to serve the Filipinos while it masterfully persecutes political enemies.”
Despite her attempts to play down the assassination threat, the authorities are treating the threat with deadly seriousness. In a video recording released through his social media channels yesterday, Marcos vowed to “fight back” against the “troubling” threats.
Yesterday, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) subpoenaed Duterte, whom it previously described as the “self-confessed mastermind” of a “premeditated plot to assassinate the president.” Its purpose, the Department of Justice said in a statement, will be “to shed light on the investigation for alleged grave threats and possible violation of Republic Act No. 11479,” otherwise known as the Anti-Terrorism Act, as well as to substantiate the plot against her own life that Duterte mentioned on Saturday.
This latest wild controversy marks a new low point in the relationship between Marcos and Duterte. The pair formed a formidable partnership ahead of the presidential election of 2022, winning their respective elections in a landslide. But the relationship has since collapsed with remarkable speed due to a toxic combination of personal and political differences. In June, Duterte resigned from Marcos’s cabinet, saying that she felt “used” by the president and his allies. Meanwhile, her father Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos’s predecessor as president, has been vocally critical of the Marcos administration.
While the Dutertes have lobbed increasingly unhinged accusations at Marcos and his allies, the latter have responded by wielding the power of the state. In recent months, Marcos’ allies in the House have opened probes into Sara Duterte’s alleged misuse of government funds as vice president and education secretary – the issue that prompted her outbursts against Marcos on Saturday – and into Duterte Sr.’s violent “war on drugs.”
The likely legal battles over Duterte’s alleged assassination threat are set to entrench the enmity further as the two camps prepare for a proxy battle at the mid-term elections due in May 2025. Sara Duterte has also expressed an interest in running for the presidency in 2028, something that the Marcos camp will no doubt strenuously oppose.
In an ominous sign of what could come, the Duterte camp has begun referencing (and trying to associate itself with) the legacy of the EDSA People Power revolution, which led to the overthrow of Marcos’s dictatorial father, President Ferdinand E. Marcos, in 1986. Sara Duterte this week accused the Marcos family of the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., who was gunned down in 1983 on the tarmac at Manila’s airport – an airport that now bears his name. Supporters of Duterte then gathered in their hundreds yesterday at the EDSA Shrine, a church in Quezon City that serves as a memorial to the People Power revolution.
The fact that the Dutertes are willing to veil their personal ambitions in the legacy of EDSA – an event that is both sacred to many Filipinos and carries implications of regime change – is a sign that their political struggle with the Marcoses is now entering a new and intensely bitter phase.