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The Epic Dynastic Feud Behind the Arrest of the Former Philippine President

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WSJ

Mar 13, 2025 11:06 AM IST

The power struggle between the Philippines’ Marcos and Duterte families roils the key American ally.

Philippine President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte in Manila, after he took the oath of office in 2022.

She had ordered a hit man, the vice president said, to kill the president in the event she herself turned up dead.

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The Epic Dynastic Feud Behind the Arrest of the Former Philippine President

For months, tensions had built between Sara Duterte, the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, the divisive former president of the Philippines, and President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., himself the scion and namesake of the country’s longtime dictator. Considered a natural successor to her father, Sara Duterte was watching her political fortunes slip amid allegations of large-scale corruption and attacks on her family’s friendly ties with China.

So in a midmorning news conference in November, Sara Duterte clapped back. She said she had asked a hit man to assassinate Marcos Jr., along with his wife and the speaker of the country’s House of Representatives.

“I said, do not stop until you kill them,” Sara Duterte said. The hit man, she added, “said yes.”

The profanity-laden briefing was an astonishing episode in the high-stakes political feud now roiling one of America’s prime allies in the Pacific. Pitched against each other are the Philippines’ two most powerful dynasties—the Dutertes and the Marcoses—who have steered the fortunes of the island nation for much of the past six decades. Their feud entered a decisive new chapter this week with the arrest of former President Duterte on charges of crimes against humanity.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court allege that he is responsible for the extrajudicial killings of thousands of Filipinos during the country’s “war on drugs.” The bloody counternarcotics campaign began in the late 1980s, when Duterte became mayor of the family stronghold of Davao in the southern Philippines, and spread nationwide during his presidency from 2016 to 2022.

Within hours of his arrest, Duterte, who turns 80 this month, was bundled onto a chartered plane en route to The Hague, where the ICC is based. The Philippines’ Supreme Court, most of whose judges Duterte had appointed, declined to rush a temporary restraining order that would have kept him in the country.

In a defiant selfie video recorded just before his plane landed in Europe, Duterte once more took responsibility for the war-on-drugs policies. “For…whatever happened in the past, I will front our law enforcement and our military,” he said. “I will continue to serve my country and if this is my destiny, so be it.”

His is the highest-profile arrest in the ICC’s history and comes as the court has struggled to get states to act on its warrants, including for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was made possible, current and former Filipino and ICC officials said, by the collapse of a political marriage of convenience between the Dutertes and the Marcoses, families long saddled with allegations of financial and rights abuses.

More than a year ago, a senior ICC official said, the Marcos Jr. government had quietly communicated to the court that Philippine authorities would act on an international warrant for Duterte should one be issued. The message, shared by a senior Filipino official, contradicted public statements by the president at the time that he opposed the ICC investigation. The ICC official said prosecutors were aware that the government was moving against Duterte for political reasons, but knew that the dispute offered perhaps the only opportunity to arrest the former president.

A plane carrying former President Rodrigo Duterte takes off from the Philippines after his arrest.

Duterte’s arrest has “nothing to do with accountability, nothing to do with justice for thousands of families victimized by the drug war,” said Ruben Carranza, who, as part of a presidential commission in the early 2000s, helped recover hundreds of millions of dollars hidden in foreign banks during the elder Marcos’s 22-year rule. “It’s simply a question of two families competing for power.”

The office of President Marcos Jr. didn’t respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for Rodrigo Duterte have said that his arrest was illegal, citing, among other points, the Philippines’ decision in 2019 to pull out of the treaty that governs the ICC.

In a news conference on Tuesday, Marcos Jr. rejected the idea that the arrest of his predecessor was political and denied that his government was working with the ICC.

“We are not speaking to [the] ICC. They are requesting plenty of documents that we did not give,” Marcos Jr. said. He said Philippine authorities acted on a request from Interpol, the international law-enforcement body on which the court relies to circulate its warrants. “This is what the international community expects of us as the leader of a democratic country,” he said.

The complicated relationship between the Marcoses and the Dutertes dates to the 1960s, when Duterte’s father served in the first cabinet of the elder Marcos. Two decades later, in 1986, Duterte’s mother, a teacher and activist, sided with the People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos and sent the family, including first lady Imelda and Marcos Jr., into temporary exile.

The departure of Marcos’s allies from the Davao city government helped usher Rodrigo Duterte into the office of mayor in 1988. Duterte founded and led the Davao Death Squad, a group of police officers and vigilantes with a mission to kill anyone even loosely suspected of selling drugs, according to public testimony from former members of the squad and the ICC warrant.When he won the presidency in 2016, Duterte made no secret of his role in the bloody campaign. “Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there are three million drug addicts” in the Philippines, he said months after his election. “I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

His violent rhetoric—and the bodies that piled up in streets across the country—earned him rebukes from abroad, but his campaign was popular at home. He left office in 2022 with approval ratings above 70%. Human Rights Watch estimates that at least 12,000 Filipinos were killed in the war on drugs during his presidency.

By then, his daughter, Sara, had served her own stretch as mayor of Davao and was favored in the polls for the next president. Viral videos showed her punching a sheriff who wanted to demolish a Davao slum. Many Filipinos were surprised when she instead ran for the vice presidency, leaving the top job to Marcos Jr. In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately, but the two campaigned as effective running mates. “It was a fairly basic calculation that if they both ran for president, they would lose,” said Carranza, now a senior expert with the International Center for Transitional Justice, a nonprofit based in New York.

Marcos Jr. won the presidency with an overwhelming margin. It was a triumph that allowed him to recast his father’s tainted legacy. The deal, many Filipinos assumed, was that Sara Duterte would go for the presidency in 2028, when Marcos Jr. wouldn’t be eligible for another run under the country’s one-term rule.

But soon, cracks began to appear in the alliance between the two dynasties. The president didn’t give Sara Duterte the powerful defense ministry she had requested, instead handing her the education department. The elder Duterte had moved the Philippines closer to China and suspended military exercises with the U.S. Marcos Jr., meanwhile, pulled the country back toward Washington and openly challenged Beijing’s claims on the South China Sea.

In January last year, Rodrigo Duterte, months after a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, accused Marcos Jr. of being a drug addict, followed by a crude epithet. The president hit back with the same accusation against his predecessor.In June, Sara Duterte resigned from the cabinet, but stayed on as vice president. Soon after, she publicly ruminated about cutting off the president’s head.

Martin Romualdez, the speaker of the House and a cousin of Marcos Jr., backed an investigation into millions of dollars in public funds she allegedly misappropriated. Lawmakers summoned her father to interrogate him about the war on drugs.

By the time she made her comments about hiring a hit man, members of Congress had brandished receipts that allegedly showed how money went to made-up recipients, with names derived from popular snack brands and restaurants. Sara Duterte’s approval ratings dropped amid her refusal to appear at the hearings and her staff’s failure to explain some of the alleged payments. She has denied misappropriating public funds.

“She comes off as this arrogant, entitled nepo-baby,” said Carlos Conde, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in the Philippines who previously covered the Dutertes as a journalist.

Vice President Sara Duterte has denied misappropriating public funds.

In February, the House voted to impeach Sara Duterte, on charges that include allegations of corruption and her threats against the president. By then, administration officials were saying publicly that they would act on an ICC warrant against her father.

The senior ICC official said prosecutors spotted an opening when father and daughter traveled to host a rally for Filipino workers in Hong Kong over the weekend. It was easier to arrest the president at an airport upon his return to the Philippines than at his residence in Davao. On Friday, judges at the court approved a secret warrant that prosecutors had filed last month.

Rodrigo Duterte’s fate now depends on the court, where previous defendants have been acquitted for lack of evidence or have seen the charges against them dropped. His daughter faces a trial in the Senate later this year, where, if impeached, she would be banned for life from running for office again.

Before then, however, Filipinos vote in midterm elections in May that are now overshadowed by the dynastic feud. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism counted at least 10 members of the wider Marcos clan running for office in various levels of government this year. It tallied at least five Dutertes in the race, including the former president who was considering a return as Davao mayor.

On Wednesday, Sara Duterte was on her way to The Hague, to stand by her father. Before she took off, she told journalists that she viewed the arrest as an attack by the president against her and her family’s political ambitions. “It’s very personal,” she said.Write to Gabriele Steinhauser at Gabriele.Steinhauser@wsj.com and Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com

The Epic Dynastic Feud Behind the Arrest of the Former Philippine President

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