A Facebook (FB) reel is claiming that Vice President Sara Duterte is having the same fate as Fernando Lopez Sr., the vice president of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who was supposedly impeached in 1966. This is false.
No reliable sources state that Lopez was impeached during his vice presidency. News reports, local historians and political pundits have cited Duterte as the first-ever Philippine vice president to be impeached.
Uploaded on June 26, the reel bore an overlaid text that read:
“HISTORY REPEATED B4 VP Fernando Lopez Impeach Ni Marcos Sr Now VP Sarah Duterte impeach Ni Marcos Jr. laban2x vp Sarah
(HISTORY REPEATED Before, VP Fernando Lopez was impeached by Marcos Sr. Now, VP Sarah Duterte is impeached by Marcos Jr. Fight, fight VP Sarah)”
According to a briefer on the vice presidency from The Official Gazette, Lopez, who was in his second term as vice president under Marcos Sr., was set to serve until Dec. 30, 1973.
However, his term was cut short with the declaration of Martial Law in September 1972, based on the briefer which was republished by ABS-CBN News in 2016. Under this regime, the 1973 Constitution, which was ratified to replace the amended 1935 Constitution, abolished the vice presidency,
The spurious reel used a graphic from a Jan. 3 post by satirical FB page, AMP Satire, which discussed the removal of Lopez and Duterte from the National Security Council under the administrations of Marcos Sr. and his namesake son, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., respectively. The post did not mention any impeachment-related issues.
Executive Order No. 330, which created the NSC in 1950, states that the council shall be composed of various heads of government agencies, including the vice president.
However, Marcos Sr. created in 1966 an executive committee of the NSC through Executive Order No. 13, in which Lopez was excluded. The council was composed of the secretaries of various government agencies such as defense, foreign affairs, justice and finance, as well as the executive secretary.
Through Executive Order 81, signed by incumbent Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin last December 2024, Marcos Jr. also reorganized the NSC, excluding the vice president and the country’s past presidents from the council’s composition.
The removal of Duterte from the NSC came following her disclosure that she plotted to assassinate Marcos Jr. Bersamin explained that the vice president’s exclusion was because her position was “not considered relevant to the responsibilities of membership in the NSC.”
The inaccurate FB reel emerged five days after Marcos Jr., in an episode of the BBM Podcast published on June 21 said, “I had no role in the impeachment [against Duterte],” noting that “all impeachment processes are in the legislature—between Congress and the Senate.”
Published by FB user Wenggonzales Olalo Alicabo (ウェンアリカボ), the false video has so far garnered 8,400 interactions.
