Sara Duterte faces fresh impeachment try in Philippines

Sara Duterte at a campaign rally. Photo: Jason Gutierrez / Asia Times MANILA – The Philippine House of Representatives voted to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte Monday for large-scale corruption and threats to assassinate the country’s leader. But as the House was voting, Duterte’s allies in the Senate launched a coup and took control of the body, virtually assuring that an impeachment trial there would likely be tilted to her favor. Alan Peter Cayetano, who once served as foreign secretary under the presidency of the vice president’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, emerged as the new Senate president. The elder Duterte, a former president from 2016-2022, is now detained in The Hague awaiting trial for crimes against humanity for the deaths of thousands in his drug war. Under the rules, the 24 members of the Senate assume the role of judges for the impeachment trial. As it is, the vice president’s allies now hold the majority there. But if she were convicted, she would be removed and barred from ever running for public office again. 255 members of the House of Representatives voted to impeach her, while 26 voted against impeachment on Monday (May 11). Nine abstained. Sara Duterte was impeached in 2025, but she was never tried in the Senate. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered not to put her on trial on a constitutional technicality. Congresswoman Leila de Lima, a former senator who was jailed by Sara’s father for opposing his drug war, said that the House justice committee reviewed “voluminous documentary evidence” and heard testimonies that pointed to Sara Duterte’s culpability. “It was clear what we heard. We saw evidence of misuse and abuse of confidential funds amounting to hundreds of millions of pesos. We heard testimony regarding questionable disbursements, fictitious identities, and liquidation documents with indications of falsehood and falsification. We examined evidence of unexplained wealth and billions in suspicious and covered transactions that are manifestly disproportionate to declared and known lawful income,” she told the House plenary. “We confronted deeply disturbing threats and inflammatory rhetoric that target not only ranking public officials but attack the very heart of our constitutional order,” de Lima said. What was alleged were not “isolated or random incidents,” she said, but are “habits of abuse of power.” “These are matters that go into the integrity, accountability, and fitness of a public official occupying the second-highest position in our government,” de Lima said. “The constitutional process of accountability could not move forward if we shirked our duties in this House, if we dropped the ball in this plenary.”Monday’s dramatic episode is the latest in a heightening feud between two of the Southeast Asian nation’s leading political clans. Sara Duterte teamed up with Ferdinand Marcos Jr in the 2022 elections to corner the Philippines’ top two political spots. But the alliance soon crumbled, and Marcos allowed Sara’s father, Rodrigo, to be arrested and sent to The Hague to face the International Criminal Court (ICC), for thousands of deaths in his drug war. Apart from allegations of misusing huge state funds, Sara Duterte, is also accused of directly threatening Marcos by saying she had hired an assassin to kill him and his wife if she too were slain. Meanwhile, at the Senate, one of its members, Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, a former police chief who enforced Duterte’s drug war with deadly efficacy, appeared Monday to participate in the coup. He was last seen publicly months ago, amid rumors he would be taken in by the authorities carrying out an arrest warrant issued by the ICC. He engaged justice officials in a cat-and-mouse chase, but the Senate leadership later vowed to protect him from any arrest. “I’m not sure where they got the authority to chase him and incidentally, I think he’s about to be captured by them for purposes of serving him or rendering him or even surrendering him to the ICC,” said pro-Duterte Senator Rodante Marcoleta. “We need to protect the senator.” Jason Gutierrez was head of Philippine news at BenarNews, an online news service affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA), a Washington-based news organization that covered many under-reported countries in the region. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has also worked with The New York Times and Agence France-Presse (AFP).