Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

years of covering a state-sanctioned massacre does odd things to the mind. I had learned to qualify every statement and to burn transcripts on my balcony. I had lain awake nights convinced that a misplaced comma could be grounds for criminal libel. For someone with my sort of obsessive imagination, the practical caution required of a drug war reporter morphed into an almost paralyzing paranoia.

I couldn’t trust my memory to write out my own name.

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.

The fact that I’m a Filipino living in the Philippines means that for me, there’s no going home from the field.

The language failed as the body count rose. There are no synonyms for blood or bleed.

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.

I believed in democracy much the same way I believed in short sentences and small words.

There would be no forgiveness, there would be no second chances, the line would be drawn, and on one side he would stand with a loaded gun. The law might be optional, the thugs might be at the helm, but Duterte was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, who might give you a warning and then count one, two, three.

I’m a trauma reporter. People like me work in the uneasy space between what is and what should be. My stories offered no solutions, no proposed salvation.

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.

Many of us, the children of middle-class Manila, were fed on Catholic guilt and raised under the bright sun of the American dream.

I understood the character I had been assigned: mascot for hope, in a country desperate for good news.

My grasp of geography, never strong, was marked by provincial death tolls. I knew localities by the number of dead and could recite them, year by year, at a time when I couldn’t remember my own zip code.

They had been stabbed in the neck like chickens. Stabbed, not shot, because bullets were too expensive to waste.