Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

As a field correspondent for Rappler in Manila, I was one of the reporters covering the results of the president’s pledge to destroy anyone—without charge or trial—whom he or the police or any of a number of vigilantes suspected of taking or selling drugs. The volume of Duterte’s dead was at times overwhelming, as was covering the powerful in a country where the powerful refuse to be held to account.

At the time, I was investigating a series of killings in the capital. It was slow work. I hunted down witnesses. I culled official reports. I met men who detailed the precise manner in which they killed their own neighbors on orders from above, then sent interview requests to the police officers they accused. Rappler decided my presence in Manila was a security risk. I agreed.

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 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. We went to church. We went to school. We recited the rosary every night and ate no meat on Good Friday. We hung tinsel on plastic Christmas trees, studied John Steinbeck, memorized the beatitudes, and measured our skirts a polite three inches below the knees. Money was tight, but there were books.

I said, with considerable righteous naïveté, that no person deserved abduction and torture, Communist or otherwise. 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.

It was normal, for example, for a boy looking for his brother to ask for directions to the nearest pile of cadavers.

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. “Their repertoire of warfare—drawn from both military counterinsurgency as well as communist guerilla methods and practice—was perfected during dictatorship and proved equally effective in democracy,” wrote journalist Sheila Coronel.

There were many targets. A review of a single Davao newspaper’s reporting showed at least eighty-four vigilante killings had occurred in the first three months of 2005. That year, the U.S. Mission in Manila reportedly filed a classified document describing the Davao Death Squad as “a vigilante group linked with Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.”

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On paper, Jose was a civilian auxiliary member of the Police Anti-Crime Unit. In practice, his job was to bury the bodies. Sometimes he was asked to help in the killing, but he never held the knife. Mostly he pinned the men down.

Not all the murders happened in the Laud quarry. Sometimes the teams went into homes and killed fellow cops. Sometimes there was collateral damage, because it was important to keep quiet, and that meant murdering witnesses too.

Death, in the end, disappears all voices.

In the first six weeks of Rodrigo Duterte’s war, according to the police, 899 people were killed, described by Philippine National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa as “the dead who were just found floating along canals, the dead who were dumped along roads with their hands tied and their faces, eyes, and mouths taped, also those killed by riding-in-tandem, or those who were just shot.”

Rodrigo Duterte called himself a killer, “just an ordinary killer,” but he was adamant that he was no murderer. Not once, in speech after speech, did he demand the murder of the sons of bitches he promised would die. He blustered. He threatened. He evaded. He was only kidding, he said sometimes. He would pardon himself, he said other times.

They would be drowned, stabbed, shot, buried, dropped into Manila Bay, fed to fishes, and sent to purgatory, and none of it would be murder because it was not murder, only justice. It was not a rationalization for the use of force. Nor was it a declaration of war. It was a call for execution.

It took the cops less than twenty-four hours to bag thirty more corpses.

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.

More than a hundred suspects “who yielded” were arrested. All thirty-two suspects who offered armed resistance were shot and killed. There were no injured cops. There were no wounded suspects. To believe this narrative is to believe that local cops clocked a 100 percent kill rate, higher than the already improbable 97 percent reported by a Reuters investigative team in 2016, higher than the 83 percent of the notorious police shootings in Rio de Janeiro.

In the town of Datu Saudi Ampatuan in Maguindanao, in the south, the mayor and nine of his men were killed in what was reported to be a police shoot-out. The mayor of Ozamiz City in Misamis Occidental was shot dead in an encounter that also killed his wife, his brother, his sister, and eleven others. The mayor of Ronda was murdered as he slept inside his office in the town hall, just seven months after his vice-mayor was ambushed by unidentified gunmen. The mayor of Albuera was placed in police custody after allegedly being found with high-powered firearms and eleven kilos of crystal meth. He was killed inside his jail cell by cops who said they shot him in self-defense. In Tanauan City, an unknown sniper’s bullet killed the seventy-two-year-old mayor as he stood singing the national anthem just outside the city hall. He too had been called a narco politician and had been stripped of supervisory powers over the police.

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.”

The police officers who dragged Jee Ick Joo out of his Angeles City home on a pretend drug bust had been waving a fake arrest warrant. They took him to the national police headquarters, where a drug unit cop, armed with a roll of packing tape and surgical gloves, strangled the detained businessman. They demanded ₱8 million in ransom from his wife, got ₱5 million, then refused to provide proof of life.

In 1961 the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin published The Image, a book that introduced the term pseudo-event. The pseudo-event is not spontaneous. It exists primarily for the purpose of being reported. It has an ambiguous relationship to reality. It is, when successful, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The pseudo-event is not propaganda, because it happened. The facts, artificial as they are, provide a bulwark against criticism. “While propaganda substitutes opinion for facts,” wrote Boorstin, “pseudo-events are synthetic facts which move people indirectly, by providing the ‘factual’ basis on which they are supposed to make up their minds.”

In the story Simon told, police officers promised CSG Tondo Chapter 2—“we’re what you call vigilantes”—payment for every corpse they delivered. He had been recruited by Commander Maning. Maning gave the orders, and the men would follow. This man, that man, get it done, do the job—you, you, and you. The names of targets were announced at the CSG Chapter 2 outpost. The photos were stuck to the walls. The targets included meth users, drug runners, thieves, and the occasional philandering husband. Simon estimated the gang’s death count at roughly twenty over a seven-month period.

Once Commander Maning announced a target, the surveillance team would fan out, four to seven men. They would watch the target, sometimes for days, from across an alley or the stoop of a corner store. They would listen when plans were made, befriend neighbors, and note when children came home. Sometimes the surveillance men would look through windows or knock on the door to purchase a sachet of meth—no problem, no worries, here you go, the folded hundred-peso bill just a quiet deal between friends.

Sometimes they would use a van one of the members owned, sometimes a motorcycle with unregistered plates. If the target survived the first shot, another man would be waiting. He could be sitting at an outdoor canteen with a bowl of noodles. He could be on his phone, standing by the side of the road. He moved only after the target fell and the shooter ran. If the target twitched, he would fire the killing shot. They called him the finisher.

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.

Slaughter dressed up in bureaucratese dulls the senses, and over time can anesthetize an entire population to the horror happening right where they live.

The people who regret voting for Duterte have many reasons for stepping away. They are angry at the country’s deepening relationship with China. They are unhappy with the loss of ABS-CBN, the media network that had been padlocked under the Marcos dictatorship and now struggles to survive without a franchise. They are distressed by the government’s failure to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Some, the Catholic faithful, have been thrown by the fact that the president called God stupid. Others speak of having supported a drug war they did not understand.

“I have asked myself many times,” Ninoy Aquino once said, “is the Filipino worth suffering, or even dying, for? Is he not a coward who would readily yield to any colonizer, be he foreign or homegrown? Is a Filipino more comfortable under an authoritarian leader because he does not want to be burdened with the freedom of choice? Is he unprepared or, worse, ill-suited for presidential or parliamentary democracy?”