A senior Philippine police official has filed a criminal complaint against former President Rodrigo Duterte over comments he made during a campaign rally last week, at which he jokingly threatened to kill 15 incumbent senators to make way for his party’s own slate of candidates.
The complaint against Duterte was filed yesterday by police Maj. Gen. Nicolas Torre III of the Philippine National Police (PNP).
“I am filing this as a citizen,” Torres told reporters yesterday, BenarNews reported. “And you know, I’m a policeman. It’s part of the PNP to make sure that we protect the citizenry from criminal activities like this.” The complaint accuses the 79-year-old former leader of incitement to sedition and unlawful utterances, offenses punishable under the Revised Penal Code.
Duterte’s comments were made in a speech during his party PDP-Laban’s senatorial proclamation rally in San Juan City, at which its nine senatorial candidates were announced. During the speech, he joked about using a bomb to kill 15 senators, some of whom were campaigning under the ticket of his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to create more vacancies for the party’s candidates to contest.
“Now, there’s many of them. What should we do? Let’s kill the senators now to create vacancies,” he said in Tagalog, according to The Inquirer. “If we can kill around 15 senators, we can all go in. But, they’d be pitiful. Yet they’re irritating — not all of them, though. Talking of opportunities, the only way to do it is to use a bomb,” he said. The Inquirer reported that the comments prompted laughter from his audience.
Twelve of the Philippines’ 24 Senate seats are up for election in mid-term elections on May 12. The opening days of campaigning have already been marked by bitter exchanges between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and various members of the Duterte clan. The two political families teamed up to great effect ahead of the 2022 presidential election but have since fallen out in spectacular and public fashion and are readying their proxies for the mid-term elections, with an eye on the presidential election due in 2028.
Duterte’s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, is currently facing impeachment over a raft of charges. Among the most serious is her public boast in November that she had contracted a killer to assassinate Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his wife, and his cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, in the event of her own murder. The vice president has since denied that her remarks amounted to a threat to kill Marcos.
In response to Torre’s filing, one of Duterte’s legal counsels, Salvador Panelo, argued that the former president’s remarks at the rally were a “joke.”
“The grave threats complaint he and his agency have filed against [Duterte] is dismissible in the prosecutor’s office outright, for utter lack of legal basis and for being ludicrous as well,” Panelo said in a statement yesterday.
This is probably true; the gruff former leader has been known to exhibit a black sense of humor. However, Duterte’s long track record of advocating and using violence to solve social problems, most notably in the violent anti-drug campaign that he began in Davao City and then expanded to the nation as a whole once he took office in 2016, makes it hard to draw such a clean line between jokes and serious intent. Before and during his presidency, he repeatedly threatened to kill suspected drug dealers and put this ruthless anti-drug message at the center of his campaign for the presidency in 2016.
Torres said yesterday that while Duterte may have been joking, the ex-president has many “blind supporters” who might take his threats seriously and carry them out. This is especially the case given the current state of acrimony between the Dutertes and Marcoses.
“Our country went through a lot of troubles in those past six years,” Torre told reporters, referring to Duterte’s presidency from 2016 to 2022. “Do we want those troubles to continue, the constant threats of killings that they will dismiss later by just saying that these were just a joke?”