MANILA, Philippines – President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s son, Senior Deputy Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, fought back following Vice President Sara Duterte’s off-script tirades against his father and dictator-grandfather.
“As a son, I cannot stay silent while she threatens to exhume a former president and behead an incumbent one,” Congressman Marcos said of the country’s number two in a statement on Tuesday, October 22. “Her bizarre temper tantrum has been condemned by a nation horrified from such displays of insensitivity towards the dead and cruelty to the living.”
“Going ballistic was perhaps the self-therapy she prescribed for herself. But she crossed the line, leaving the civic and civil space in which disagreements can be rationally argued,” he added.
The younger Marcos said he “held my tongue out of respect for the Vice President” and that his father “advised me to withhold my disappointment.” Malacañang’s Presidential News Desk officially distributed his statement.
During Duterte’s two-hour press briefing last week, she claimed she once imagined decapitating the incumbent president, and threatened to exhume the late dictator’s remains from the heroes’ cemetery and throw it into the West Philippine Sea if the administration does not stop politically harassing her.
It was Sara Duterte’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, who gave the go signal to bury Marcos Sr. at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani in 2016, following approval from the Supreme Court.
The move was strongly opposed at the time by critics, especially from survivors of the Martial Law regime, a dark period in Philippine history that saw thousands of killings and enforced disappearances.
Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte ran as a tandem in 2022, and their alliance catapulted them to the country’s two highest posts in a landslide victory.
Their relationship has soured in the past two years, with infighting between Duterte and Marcos’ allies spilling into public view, until Duterte finally resigned from the Cabinet in June.
Duterte has since accused Marcos’ allies in the House of Representatives, which has been investigating her alleged misuse of public funds, of plotting her removal from office. – Rappler.com
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