Philippine Court Orders Arrest of Vice President Sara Duterte for Threatening To Assassinate President Marcos, His Wife and Cousin

The battle between the Philippines’ rival ruling families has escalated with an arrest warrant against Vice President Sara Duterte for threatening to kill her enemies in power.Ms. Duterte, who ran on the same ticket with President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. in 2022, came to dislike him so intensely that she remarked nearly two years ago that she had ordered his assassination and that of his wife and a powerful cousin.Apparently fearful for her own life, Ms. Duterte, at an online press conference, placed one condition on the order. She would have to be killed first.““Do not worry about my security because I already spoke to someone,” she told reporters at the time. “I said, if I am killed, kill BBM (Bongbong Marcos), Liza Araneta (Mr. Marcos’ wife) and Martin Romualdez,” a nephew of Bongbong’s mother, Imelda, and former speaker of the Philippines’ House of Representatives.“No joke, no joke,” Ms. Duterte added for good measure.If those remarks were mainly for dramatic impact, they were enough for the Philippines justice department, under Mr. Marcos, to charge her with issuing “grave threats.” That charge echoes the same “grave threats” at the center of her impeachment by the country’s House of Representatives.The cases would appear to jeopardize her chances of running for president in 2028 as political heir to her father, Rodrigo Duterte, who served as president before Mr. Marcos. While Ms. Duterte battles for her political life, Mr. Duterte is being held by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for the deaths of thousands of people in his war against drugs while mayor of the large southern post of Davao and then during his presidency.Ms. Duterte, however, is not giving up easily in the battle between the Duterte clan in Davao and that of the Marcos family, whose power base is the province of Ilocos Norte north of the Philippine capital of Manila.Her legal team is arguing that she cannot be tried for the same offense that’s led to her impeachment. “She has no intention of evading the law and will continue to exercise all her legal remedies,” said one of her attorneys. The Philippine Senate, after numerous delays, is to vote by November at the earliest on whether to approve her impeachment and expel her from office.Ms. Marcos advocates are sure to try to delay the Senate vote yet again while also arguing against the court case. They won an initial victory when the justice department dropped the charge of “sedition” against her. A conviction, however, could still end her political career, as Mr. Marcos presumably wants.The hearings on Ms. Duterte in the Senate will coincide with the opening at the end of November of the case against her father at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Arrested in March of last year, he was extradited to the Hague through a deal between the ICC and Mr. Marcos, who was glad to get rid of his worst political foe while battling Ms. Duterte.Mr. Marcos and Ms. Duterte appeared as political allies when they ran for president and vice president in 2022. The voting for those two posts is conducted separately in the Philippines, and they soon fell out after getting elected by wide margins. She claimed in a posting last year to have nothing against him personally but called him “a weak leader.” The country, she said, “is in chaos.”Whatever happens to either Mr. Duterte or his daughter, however, the Duterte dynasty will remain a formidable power. His oldest son, Paolo, is a member of the Philippine congress while his youingest son is mayor of Davao.Nor will Mr. Marcos, whose father, Ferdinand Marcos, ruled for 20 years before fleeing with his wife Imelda, family and cronies in the 1986 People Power Revolution, escape blame for the Philippines’ problems. His cousin, Martin Romualdez, resigned as speaker of the lower house of the Philippines congress in a massive corruption scandal in which he was alleged to have received enormous kickbacks in urgently needed flood control projects.Mr. Marcos “is clearly complicit,” the website Asia Sentinel quoted Florencio Abad, former budget secretary under the late Philippine president, Benigno Aquino III, as saying. “He knew this” while claiming to have been “betrayed by his political allies.”

Philippine Court Orders Arrest of Vice President Sara Duterte for Threatening To Assassinate President Marcos, His Wife and Cousin

Philippine Court Orders Arrest of Vice President Sara Duterte for Threatening To Assassinate President Marcos, His Wife and Cousin

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