This is classified in the Rappler archives as a Newsstand column, but in fact it is a review, specifically commissioned by our managing editor Glenda Gloria, timed for release on the day Pat Evangelista's book Some People Need Killing was launched in New York. (In the end, we decided to run it the morning after, so as not to compete with the news reports about the launch.) Published in Rappler on October 18, 2023.
Rodrigo Duterte was the only candidate for Philippine president who promised to kill thousands of his potential voters to solve what he called a drug crisis; he would fill Manila Bay with the corpses of as many as a hundred thousand drug addicts, he said. Once voted into office, he made good on that promise.
Some People Need Killing, the journalist Patricia Evangelista's much-anticipated account of Duterte's promised war on drugs, includes in its breadth of detail and casualty count and dramatic incident some of those very Duterte voters who ended up killed in Duterte's war. There is even an entire chapter on Duterte supporters consumed by regret. This may have been an effort on Evangelista's part to end her harrowing, thoughtful, absorbing account on a less bleak note, but she is above all else a reporter, and her faithful reporting does not sugarcoat reality. Thousands of extrajudicial killings had changed the country irrevocably. A nation of martyrs has become a country of killers. Some of the early vigilantes called it right. We are Duterte, they said.
Evangelista's account is a memoir of her coverage of the EJKs and what led her to it (it is subtitled "A Memoir of Murder in My Country"); but it is also reportage, some new and some already published but expanded, filled with even more detail and drawn with more context, all of it reworked into a whole; it is, lastly, an analysis, of how a democracy can die.
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