Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

There is language for this phenomenon. The term is “extrajudicial killings.” It was the single phrase that became commonplace on the street and on television, so common that a Senate resolution called for sessions investigating “the recent rampant extrajudicial killings and summary executions of criminals.” The repetition forced a shorthand—EJK. The press used it as a qualifier. The victims’ families used it as a verb. The critics used it as an accusation.

I ran away halfway through the war.

Many things were suspect: white vans, flashing lights, spam emails, men on motorcycles, automated credit card transactions, the waiter at the coffee shop, the hotel clerk asking for my billing address, a ringing phone, a dropped call, the doorbell.

🤧

By the time I stood at JFK airport, blank disembarkation form in hand, I couldn’t trust my memory to write out my own name. I verified the spelling against my passport. I remember distinctly the compulsion to find a second source—and found it, in my birth certificate.

Journalists are taught they are never the story. As it happened, the longer I was a journalist, the better it suited me to disappear behind the professional voice of an omniscient third person, belonging everywhere and nowhere, asking questions and answering none.

Every conclusion I published was double-sourced, fact-checked, and hyperlinked.

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.

Love, he said, just before the bullet slammed into his head.

😰

My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.

Kill, for example. It’s a word my president uses often. He said it at least 1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency, in a variety of contexts and against a range of enemies.

There were corpses every night at the height of the killings. Seven, twelve, twenty-six, the brutality reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each.

Dead is a good word for a journalist in the age of Duterte. Dead doesn’t negotiate, requires little verification. Dead is a sure thing, has bones, skin, and flesh, can be touched and seen and photographed and blurred for broadcast. Dead, whether it’s 44 or 58 or 27,000 or 1, is dead.

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.

In the same week that Love-Love’s parents were killed, a five-year-old girl named Danica Mae was shot with a bullet meant for her grandfather.

Until the year President Duterte was elected, I considered myself the most practical sort of cynic. I understood that terrible things happen to good people. I took a morbid pride in the fact that I belonged to that special breed of correspondent for whom it was possible to stand over a corpse and note that the body in the water was probably female, that there were remains of breasts under the faded yellow shirt, despite the fact the face above the shirt was missing skin and flesh.

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.

Duterte had your back, and he said the struggle ended here, today. Fuck the bleeding hearts. To hell with the bureaucracy. 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.

“Hitler massacred three million Jews,” he said. “Now there are three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

The police said Pa had fought back. They said he was a drug dealer. They said they had killed Pa in self-defense.

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.

Every story began with the ordinary because it underscored what happened next. The blue sky before the flood of corpses. The kiss goodbye before the barrage of bullets.

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

Night after night the gunshots echoed through the slums. Those stories also began with the ordinary.

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

You knelt, and magic happened. You believed, and miracles appeared.

promised to be uncompromising in his adherence to due process and the rule of law, and conceded that criminality and illegal drug use were “mere symptoms” of ingrained social ills. He used the words whom and indeed and democratic.

His people cheered, even as he threatened to gun down their children. “If someone’s child is an addict, kill them yourselves,” he suggested, “so it won’t be so painful to their parents.”

“a male person alleged victim of summary execution.”

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.

Contronyms mean the opposite of themselves, occupying an abstract category of the English language.

sanctioned the killers. Salvage, in my country, is a contronym. It is a hopeful word everywhere else.

Salvage: Philippine English. “To apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial.”

But every child in my country knows this meaning. We learn it before we learn how to spell it, we learn it long before we discover that the rest of the world does not hear it with the same dread.

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. “Charge me when I step down,” he said in a speech at the palace. “ ‘Pardon is extended to Rodrigo Duterte for crimes against humanity,’ signed Rodrigo Duterte.”

Papardon ka jan sa The hague