The Philippines is in danger of returning to the dark days of martial law as the family of the late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, manouvre their way back towards the country’s presidency, the country’s vice president has warned.
Leni Robredo told The Times that Marcos’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, is plotting to oust her from her post as vice-president to Rodrigo Duterte, the combative demagogue who was elected president in May.
Mr Duterte, who is 71, has spoken of his poor health, and said that he may not complete his six-year term. If Mr Marcos succeeds in becoming vice-president, he will be “a breath away” from the presidency, 30 years after his father was forced into exile in a “People Power” uprising.
“Over the years, they have been inching their way in. Every one of us knows that ultimately they have set their sights on the presidency again,” the 52-year old Ms Robredo said in an interview. “Marcos wouldn’t stop at anything to be able to squeeze himself into government again through the vice presidency.”
The president and vice-president of the Philippines are elected in separate elections, so it is common for them to come from opposing political parties – as is the case with Mr Duterte and Ms Robredo.
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But while Mr Duterte’s victory was decisive, Ms Robredo beat Mr Marcos by just 264,000 votes, a margin of less than one per cent. Mr Marcos is appealing against the result with the Presidential Election Tribunal, claiming manipulation of the electronic voting system by Ms Robredo’s Liberal Party.
There is a widespread perception in the Philippines that judges can be bribed, or otherwise influenced, by powerful politicians and there is little doubt about President Duterte’s closeness to the Marcos family.
His father was a member of the dictator’s cabinet and last month, he caused outrage among liberal Filipinos by allowing his body to be reburied in Manila’s Heroes’ Cemetery.
“There is a lot of talk that he wants to railroad the whole thing [the election appeal],” said Ms Robredo.
“We know how the Marcoses operate. It’s still fresh in the memory even if it happened 30 years ago.It seems like what happened before may happen again.”
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A president and vice-president could hardly be less alike than Mr Duterte and Ms Robredo. He is a foul-mouthed provincial mayor who called Barack Obama and Pope Francis “sons of whores”, and who this week admitted riding on his motorbike and personally killing criminal suspects in his home city of Davao.
Ms Robredo is a human rights lawyer and social activist who won a seat in Congress after the death of her politician husband. Until this month, she was Mr Duterte’s housing minister, but resigned after opposing his plans to reintroduce the death penalty, and to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to nine.
She denounced his “tasteless remarks and inappropriate advances”, when he commented publicly on the length of her skirts and the attractiveness of her legs. Above all she has opposed his bloody “war on drugs”, in which close to 6000 alleged drug users have been killed by police and vigilantes since Mr Duterte came to power.
These are explained away as unsolved murders by unknown attackers or as killings in self-defence by police of suspects who shot first. Human rights groups believe that they are deliberate murders, connived in at the highest level of government.
Ms Robredo called for the International Criminal Court, which tries crimes against humanity, to intervene if Mr Duterte’s government does not show itself fit for the task.
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“We’ve heard of the participation [in killings] of many of our own enforcement agents, and yet there’s been no effort to address this. The International Criminal Court should step in if our own democratic institutions are unable to do their work,” she said.
“My opposition to the polices of President Duterte really goes beyond partisan politics. There are real threats against our democratic institutions. We have not had this since the time of the dictator in the 1980s. This administration has been just over five months and yet there’s this sense of fear and confusion and not knowing what will happen next which brings us to this crisis.”