Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

President Duterte said kill the addicts, and the addicts died. He said kill the mayors, and the mayors died. He said kill the lawyers, and the lawyers died. Sometimes the dead weren’t drug dealers or corrupt mayors or human rights lawyers. Sometimes they were children, but they were killed anyway, and the president said they were collateral damage.

I wrote about terrible things that happened because those things shouldn’t have happened and shouldn’t happen again. Then one day the man who would be president promised the deaths of his own citizens. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause.

I wrote down what I could, and while there were many who mourned, there were also many who read about the dead and said more should die.

“I’d like to be frank with you,” said the president. “Are they humans? What is your definition of a human being?” Here is Danica Mae Garcia, Maximo’s granddaughter. Here is Constantino de Juan, Christine’s Pa. Here are Love-Love’s Dee and Ma. Here is the man who killed them.

I was born in the year democracy returned to the Philippines. I am here to report its death.

In the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Thai protesters filled the streets of Bangkok. Another man stood before another tank at Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall fell, with Germany thanking the Philippines for showing them the way. Once upon a time, we were heroes.

It was a truth I thought was self-evident. I thought the problem was that the public didn’t know, because if it did, it would rise up in the same roiling mass that had protested the atrocities of the 1970s and ’80s. I was wrong, of course. People knew, but by then the disappeared were no longer people.

From an Affidavit of a Death Squad Leader In the beginning, we targeted and killed drug addicts, drug pushers, snatchers, holduppers, and other criminals. Later on, however, we were ordered by Mayor Duterte to go after and kill his personal and political enemies. We became like hired or contract killers who killed not only criminals but innocent people. —Police officer and self-described death squad leader, Makati City, February 19, 2017

Jose worked in an office. The man who ran the office gave out lists. On the lists were names. When the office was efficient, the people on the list ended up dead.

He did not worry about the mayor’s promise to slaughter criminals and drug addicts, not because he believed the mayor was joking, but because the sort of people who might be killed were not the sort of people Dondon considered necessary to his preservation.

A towel hung off one shoulder. She wept as she screamed. Reporters asked if she knew the dead man. She did not. “Everyone was just doing their jobs,” Raffy said, “like it was an everyday thing. And it was the woman who was screaming at us. ‘Don’t you have hearts? Don’t you have a conscience?’ I don’t know if she really knew the dead guy. Maybe she did, maybe not. But she was being human. Like she was the only one who made sense that night.”