by Diego Morra
Technicalities should no longer matter after the Lower House decided that the third and fourth impeachment complaints against Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio were deemed sufficient in form and substance while the complaint lodged by the Makabayan Coalition was not considered based on a technicality and does not degrade the substantive issues raised against Sara. The Supreme Court (SC) ruled that any new impeachment complaint against Sara must be filed after the one-year ban lapses on Feb. 6, 2026. That is what you call leave of absence from justice.
There is this widespread fear that aside from siphoning off the country’s wealth in the tragic event that she wins the presidency in 2028, Sara will inexorably pursue the same bloody path trailblazed by her father Rodrigo, the man who reduced the country’s worst problems to criminality, not poverty, not unemployment, not the rapacity of the billionaire class of rentiers divvying up economic sectors into their enclaves, not the fact that, as former finance secretary Cesar Purisima confessed, between 20% and 40% of the entire annual budget is paid to foreign and domestic lenders as principal and interest. The problem is crime and the solution is murder.
Included in the impeachment complaints are the threats issued by Sara against Bongbong Marcos, his wife Lisa and former Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez. The videotape showed Sara threatening to kill the three and bragging that she had already engaged a hitman to implement her order in the event that she is murdered. This threat was thus “conditional” by her reckoning and implying that the contracted killer would be avenging her elimination. Of course, there is no such thing as a conditional threat.
During a recent hearing, Negros Oriental Rep. Janice Degamo lectured Quezon City Rep. Bong Suntay that threats are not jokes that he hears from his wife, which are as tasteless as his quip about getting a hard on upon seeing Anne Curtis at a hotel. Suntay tried to brush off Sara’s threat but Degamo blunted his attempt a bland humor. “I speak from personal experience. My husband, the late Governor Roel Degamo, received threats before he was tragically murdered.” The governor was killed right at his home on Mar. 4, 2023. “The threats at first were conditional — ‘if you do this, something will happen.’ But even though they were conditional, the fear and intimidation they caused were very real.” Janice told Suntay curtly: “Conditional threats can escalate to actual harm. That happened to us.”
Sara is not a pundit or a private citizen howling against the windmills. She was purportedly elected and is thus beholden to her oath to promote, defend and defend the common weal as well as uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. By issuing a threat, she was immediately violating her oath and betraying the reason why she was elected—that she would not be a lawless and faithless official or a threat to the very nation she was supposed to serve. Yet, Sara has the money, the office, the privilege and the desire not only to threaten but to kill. Necromania is probably in the Duterte DNA. Words, as Americans say, are a loaded pistol.
What was the reason for issuing such a hallucinatory threat? Simple. Bongbong stuck to the presidency even as Sara’s partisans crafted a demand for him to resign and hand over power to Sara as early as 2023. Indeed, Sara’s overweening ambition was such that she had hinted to being content with the defense portfolio and when she failed to be appointed, she sulked but ultimately landed the education portfolio, a post to which she was hardly qualified. To make it appear that she had a casus belli, Sara jumped into the congressional fray that supposedly involved her “mentor,” the unlamented ex-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who was “demoted” by Romualdez at the Lower House. Sara launched the “tambaluslos” tag against Bongbong’s cousin and prefigured an internecine war top eventually break with Marcos Jr.
In some of her weird chats, Sara even accused Lisa of being her “teacher” in the private appropriation of public finance. Was she even aware that her own father promised the speakership to Romualdez, only for Alan Peter Cayetano to enter the race after a strange phone call from a trusted Digong aide? With her in the inner sanctum of the Marcos Jr. administration, she was demanding her pound of flesh every day, which is not the habit of those who are genuine public servants. If you look closely at Sara’s record, she manhandled a court sheriff after the poor fellow implemented a judge’s order. She was also accused by Arturo Lascanas as the “tokhang queen” who preferred the victims to be buried, the better to hide the corpus delicti. So, she is not only good at making threats; she was even better at designing the methods to make murder clean.
With the House panel deciding to proceed with the complaint, Sara’s camp has been given a deadline to respond, with the decision of the chamber expected to be supported by more than a third of its membership. Only the National Unity Party (NUP) identified with business tycoon Enrique Razon issued a statement that the allegations against Sara are not new and are insufficient to win the support of the 40-member NUP, whose secretary general was the same House secretary-general under former Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez. Sara is not expected to motor her way back to the Supreme Court (SC) to lodge another complaint to seek the dismissal of her second impeachment after the SC, through Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, slapped conditions to make impeachment abide by due process and the right of the accused public official to respond to the allegations even before trial. With a 16-member defense panel, many of them veterans of the Renato Corona impeachment trial, Sara may now be able to argue her case meticulously, a far cry from her tantrum-laced appearances before the Quad Committee.#
