Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

Every day, for a period of a little more than seven months beginning in 2016, the Philippine Daily Inquirer maintained what it called the Kill List. It was a public record of the dead, fed by reports from correspondents across the country.

“Unknown hitmen” was a common phrase, but it was the nature of their victims—suspected drug pusher, suspected drug dealer, at large on drug charges, on the local drug list, most wanted—that demonstrated that what was occurring was far from random. These were targeted killings, as President Duterte had promised, directed against “people who would threaten to destroy my country.”

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.

I was raised a citizen of the oldest democracy in Southeast Asia, and I believed, as I thought most of my generation did, in free speech and human rights and the duty to hold my government accountable.

I am afraid similar things could happen in the US too...

He was applauded, celebrated, and in the end, inaugurated.

Then one day the man who would be president promised the deaths of his own citizens. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause.

Rappler was barely four years old when President Duterte was elected. There were very few of us, but we did what we could to report on corruption and abuses of power, along with the war on drugs. President Duterte gave Rappler another name. He called us fake news. He said we were paid hacks.

This is all very reminiscent of tRump

Americans, he said, “for the sake of humanity and the lamentations of so many persecuted people,” had extended “their protecting mantle to our beloved country.” The Filipino armed militia formed an alliance with the United States. General Aguinaldo declared independence. Spain refused to raise the white flag to Filipinos, and America was happy to accommodate. The United States and Spain brokered a secret deal to keep Filipinos at bay and fought a choreographed battle.

citizens of the short-lived Philippine Republic demanded the freedom promised by the sons of liberty. America answered with an iron fist.

America had discovered that global hegemony did not require the costly maintenance of an entire archipelago of inconvenient not-quite-citizens, particularly if a nation was willing to offer preferential trade and military bases.

in 1972, Marcos announced he was declaring martial law on the pretext of widespread violence and the Communist threat. He promulgated a new constitution and effectively made himself president for life, while systematically silencing critics and the free press. The conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos lasted fourteen years, with the cheerful support of the United States.

The martial law period, as we called it, was rife with corruption, patronage, and political repression. It would result in an estimated five to ten billion dollars stolen from the national treasury, the imprisonment of 70,000, the torture of 34,000, and the extrajudicial murders of 3,240 activists.

my first conception of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue was not of a road but of a battlefield.

The revolution ended with the inauguration of Corazon Aquino. The Marcos family fled to Hawaii, granted asylum by President Reagan.

The world I described was open and borderless, there for the taking for anyone who wanted it. During those five minutes in Trafalgar Square, I was the proud Filipino speaking the language of the West, offering a happy resolution to the brutal colonial past that my imperial masters had been pleased to forget.

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

Somewhere between the depositions and the reams of reports produced by independent commissions, I discovered that I believed the survivors. It took years in the field before I could be certain of my phrasing. Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan did not disappear. They were disappeared, the accountability so direct it could be reduced to a subject and a transitive verb: The military disappeared the women.

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.

Local journalists followed, intent on documenting the event. It was understood that their presence was a bulwark against violent attack.

All of them died. They were murdered in the morning, ambushed on the side of a hill by men carrying high-powered machine guns. A mass grave had already been prepared. Thirty-two of the fifty-eight dead were journalists and staff, the highest toll of murdered media workers killed in a single day anywhere in the world.

All in '09?? Why didn't we learn that in high school?

President Aquino was not incapable of emotion, particularly when cornered and criticized. He lashed out in indignation at his critics, claiming sympathy one moment, then dismissing its value the next,

President Aquino’s six years in Malacañang Palace were a success.

But I am after all a trauma reporter, and my view of the palace is from the ground, inside the miserable tent cities

It was in this context that word came from the south. Change was coming, and his name was Rodrigo Duterte.

told you when we were discussing the peace initiatives that when they fail, as we feared they would…it becomes necessary to take out the sword of war,” President Corazon Aquino told commanders of the Philippine Military Academy. “The answer to terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform but police and military action.”

A Statement from the U.S. State Department As far as the citizens’ groups are concerned, as I understand it, these are being organized within the framework of governmental authority. They aren’t sort of free-floating vigilante groups, and President Aquino has supported this approach and we support what she’s standing for there.

A newsletter from the Institute of Current World Affairs, published in the late 1980s, included an interview with the new mayor. Alsa Masa, Duterte said, had committed some abuses, but they were “isolated happenings.” He emphasized the need to encourage Alsa Masa’s continued momentum, even to subsidize Alsa Masa’s fighters.

Sometime during Mayor Duterte’s second term, there was a sharp uptick in the murders of petty thieves, criminals, and suspected drug users. The manner of their deaths was reminiscent of Alsa Masa’s methods.

Davao Death Squad. The regional police director described the squad as “mostly of former New People’s Army partisans and some policemen.” According to Human Rights Watch, most of the victims of death squad killings were alleged drug dealers, petty criminals, and street children, as well as the family members and friends of intended targets.

A Statement from the Mayor of Davao City I don’t mind us being called the murder capital of the Philippines as long as those being killed are the bad guys.

If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination. —Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte

The Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE), based in Davao City, has put the number of deaths attributable to the Davao Death Squad at 1,424, committed between 1998 and 2015. Existing data “revealed a lull in the killings” when Duterte was elected to Congress, and “a noticeable spike” when he returned to another four terms as Davao City mayor.

That Dondon supported the presidential ambitions of the man alternately called the Butcher and the Punisher did not contradict the principles he held dear. He was law-abiding. He paid his taxes. He had never used drugs. 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. Their disappearance from society would eliminate a drain on resources. If they died, it would be for the greater good.

‘Dutertards,’

"libtards"… so many similarities to trump

“If Rodrigo Duterte wins,” we wrote, “his dictatorship will not be thrust upon us. It will be one we will have chosen for ourselves. Every progressive step society has made has been diminished by his presence. Duterte’s contempt for human rights, due process, and equal protection is legitimized by the applause at the end of every speech.

There are other terms for this. Extrajudicial killing. Vigilante-style murder. Targeted assassination. In the Philippines, a specific word evolved for this specific sort of death. The word is salvage.

Salvage, in my country, is a contronym. It is a hopeful word everywhere else. To salvage is to rescue, regardless of whether the salvaged is a ship or a soul.

In 2015 the OED appended what it called a draft definition to the official entry. Salvage: Philippine English. “To apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial.”

The Glossary of Human Rights Terms, published in 1991 by Task Force Detainees (TFD), defines salvaging as an “execution committed by government agent(s) in contravention or violation of due process of law” that is “equivalent to the international terms extra-judicial and summary executions.” In the seventeen-year period after Marcos’s declaration of martial law, the TFD reported at least 1,217 salvagings. Amnesty International put the number at 3,240.

Salvage is a contronym in the Philippines. It can mean its opposite, sometimes at the same instance. Duterte’s war salvages its own dead, repurposing the bodies into a warning for the living, cardboard signs flapping in the wind.

Deaths, Dela Rosa said, not murders. Homicides, he said, not murders. In a single surgical strike, the Philippine National Police stripped the language of intent, and reduced a pattern of executions to common crime.

Papatay ako ng tao para sa bayan ko. “I will kill people for my country.”

The thirty-two who died in that twenty-four-hour period did not constitute the national toll. All thirty-two were killed in a single province. On that day, the police stations of the province of Bulacan conducted sixty-seven operations and engaged thirty-two men in armed encounters. All thirty-two died of gunshot wounds.

“Thirty-two died early in Bulacan in a massive raid,” said President Duterte. “Maganda ‘yun.” In Filipino, maganda means “beautiful.” It can also mean “good.” It was unclear what the president meant that afternoon in August, but there was a reason every English-language local news organization chose to use the word good instead of beautiful. Good, as egregious a judgment as it was, was far less outrageous than beautiful. Beautiful would have offered an element of pleasure, a romanticizing of brutality, the impression that the commander in chief of a democratic republic was not just pleased but delighted by the ruthless killing of his citizens.

omnia praesumuntur rite et solemniter esse acta donec probetur in contrarium. “All things are presumed to have been rightly and duly performed until it is proved to the contrary.”

For cops: innocent until proven guilty

He was killed inside his jail cell by cops who said they shot him in self-defense.

It was easy, one village captain told me, to identify a drug addict. It was “the aura” that gave it away. “I can tell from the eyes.” There were many informants,

Each station operated with a quota—a percentage derived from the national government’s unfounded estimate of drug users in the population. It mattered little whether the quota was filled by the surrendered, the arrested, or the dead.

The suspension of the drug war was not an act of hypocrisy, or of hypocrisy alone. Here were senior antidrug cops who had believed they could kill a wealthy foreign national inside the national police headquarters after demanding millions from his wife, and here was the president, who, like everyone, had been witness to impunity on the streets, announcing his shock. To tell cops they were trusted while telling cops they were corrupt; to guarantee their protection while pledging to kill them; to rage daily against the inconvenience of human rights while railing in outrage when human rights were disregarded; to hold the high ground while glorying in mass graves; to profess vulgarity while promising morality; to denounce laws while pledging to uphold them; to believe in the likelihood of one murder while denying the possibility of all others; to claim to be a killer while repudiating killers—this was the magical reality of Rodrigo Duterte, one that had been applauded, broadcast, and imitated across the nation with willing alacrity.

So the murder of a rich foreign businessman is ultimately what it took to stop the killings… after 7,080 were already dead.

George Orwell’s contribution to understanding autocrats everywhere is necessary here. The word is doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously while accepting both. It was, Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the power “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.” It was to use facts only when convenient, to disavow their existence when contradictory, and “to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”