In the first two years of the drug war, Simon killed two more men. By kill, he meant he pulled the trigger. He had other roles in other operations. He conducted surveillance. He acted as a lookout. He drove the getaway van. There was very little he was unwilling to do, because success at what he calls “the job” meant one less criminal threatening the future of his children. Simon claims he was never paid, but he stayed on anyway. He believed in the cause.
“I’m really not a bad guy,” said Simon. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”
Filipina journalist Patricia Evangelista was working for the online news agency Rappler as Rodrigo Duterte (known by many nicknames from his days as a small city mayor, including “the Butcher'' and “the Punisher'') was running for and then won the Presidency of the Philippines in 2016. From day one of Duerte’s reign, both police and vigilante groups began lethally enforcing his promised war on drugs throughout the country, executing purported drug users and drug pushers — on the flimsiest of evidence and rumour — and Evangelista found herself joining the “night shift”: those brave journalists who arrived at the sites of these executions, looking for the truth and recording the stories of the dead. Evangelista began working on Some People Need Killing during a nonfiction writers’ residency in upstate New York in 2018 (an effort she describes as objective reportage, “cold and precise”), but she eventually returned home to Manila, continued to collect the truth, and has crafted her narrative into something more than mere reportage: “This is a book about the dead, and the people who are left behind. It is also a personal story, written in my own voice, as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of my people. I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine.”
Some People Need Killing is a remarkable work of witnessing: Evangelista brings many of the forgotten dead out of the shadows — often poor young men who had used drugs at some point; often shot point blank by police officers who would then plant a cheap gun on the victim and report that he had shot first — and she tells the stories of the people who loved them and the lack of consequences for their murderers. And this matters — not just because the world should be aware that this was happening (how did I not know that this was happening?), but because despite losing his bid for reelection in 2022 (to Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos; son of the corrupt and brutal dictators), Duerte still rides a populist wave in his home country (I googled Rappler and a tweet from them today reads: “In a rare move, party leaders of the House of Representatives pushed back against former President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent tirades against Congress, its leader Speaker Martin Romualdez, and for threatening to kill one member.” How does this man still walk the streets?) Truth matters and witnessing matters and getting a warning out to the rest of the world matters, and Evangelista has written a harrowing, sensitive, and fact-filled account that ought to matter to everyone. Highest rating and recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Rodrigo Duterte was not the first politician in the world to declare war on a domestic issue. Wars on poverty, pornography, hunger, obesity, cancer, and drugs have been launched and fought by presidents and potentates long before Duterte moved into Malacañang Palace. None of these wars have so far been won. None of that matters, because for the politician, the declaration is a victory all its own. The headlines are printed. The campaigns get their slogans. The solution is left to whoever comes next, or to God. But metaphorical wars were of no interest to Rodrigo Duterte, as he is a man who has no love for metaphor. He declared a war on drugs, and when he said kill, he meant dead.
In the course of detailing Duterte’s rise and reign, Evangelista shares the history of the Philippines — from its “discovery” by Ferdinand Magellan, through its “liberation” by the USA, and the string of strongman rulers seen over the past few decades (googling the Philippines' current president, I learned that two days ago Bongbong cancelled the annual public holiday that commemorated the toppling of his father’s reign) — and she shares enough about herself (I especially enjoyed her story of winning an International Public Speaking Competition in the United Kingdom as a college sophomore; leading to brief fame and strangers calling her a “national treasure”) that we understand she is an engaged citizen who loves her country and who was appalled by the frequent “extrajudicial killings” she was witness to in the course of her reportage. Nearly half of this book is made up of footnotes and attributions, and each section is finely detailed (for instance: “The district of Santa Ana, population roughly 195,000, was established by Franciscan priests in the sixteenth century in the name of Saint Anne. The police station, PS-6, hunkers under the stone shadow of the Church of Our Lady of the Abandoned, whose bells rang to signal the Philippines’ liberation from the Japanese occupation.”) and I believed every bit of it. Evangelista also discusses grammar and vocabulary in a few places (for instance, using the verb “to salvage” in the Philippines to denote a summary execution), and while I see some reviewers think this is extraneous information, I appreciated it: the truth matters, and how one writes about it matters, too.
I cannot, with any certainty, report the true toll of Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs. Numbers cannot describe the human cost of this war, or adequately measure what happens when individual liberty gives way to state brutality. Even the highest estimate — over 30,000 dead — is likely insufficient to the task.
And mostly: This is the story of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs; where life became cheap, ordinary citizens were conditioned to believe that “some people need killing” and that, as Evangelista writes, the unending executions by police officers and vigilante groups was “the natural consequence of violent rhetoric from above and wholesale impunity below.” This is a horrifying work of witnessing and I am grateful to Evangelista for risking her life to write it all down.
I want to note here, because it didn't have a home in the review, that as a Canadian — as someone who is aware of Filipinos coming to Canada to work as caregivers and cleaners; as my husband's company actively recruits from the Philippines to work as butchers and packers — I thought that people came because they were poor and were looking for jobs abroad to support families back home. I did not realise the fear, the corruption and brutality, that Filipinos live under. I do remember hearing some time ago that the president of the Philippines was threatening to execute drug dealers, and as we have a drug crisis here, too, I have to admit to maybe agreeing that "some people need killing". But I didn't know that he was talking about the police dragging poor drug users from their homes, hog-tying them with duct tape, and shooting them in the back of the head. I thought he was talking about trials and capital punishment for the worst of the worst drug lords. Evangelista writes that many people who voted for Duterte didn't realise what he was talking about either: up to 30 000 citizens killed, and none of them a drug lord. Drug use continues; the war is lost but the battles rage on. I am humbled and grateful to now better understand the Filipino struggle.
