Barack Obama’s favourite books in 2023, the Women’s Prize’s non-fiction longlist, The New York Times’s best books of 2023, and more: this book by a female journalist that follows extrajudicial killings in the Philippines has been continuously gaining critical acclaim for a reason
Patricia Evangelista is a wordsmith. In her younger years, she played with words by writing speeches and excelling in public speaking. Later in life, she made her mark as a reputable journalist for Inquirer, ANC, and currently, Rappler. As a trauma reporter, Evangelista now works with words in a way that allows her to “take the story” with her at all times, apparent in her foray into non-fiction literature and publishing of the book Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country. “When I walk into a crime scene, I try to get every detail. My general rule for myself is that if I can go home, and if I can see the entire story in my head in 360 degrees—the colour of the shoe, the terror of the scene—then I did my job,” she said in an interview with fellow journalist Karen Davila for ANC.
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Reporters, editors, and photojournalists need to acquire new skills to tell stories and do so with passion and precision. According to Guillermo Franco of Nieman Reports, “A slideshow, by itself, can tell a story, but a slideshow with audio can tell a different one.” The point is that there are several ways to tell a story, but one of the best is to go beyond the surface. “What I wanted to do was try to at least establish people beyond names on a spot report,” Evangelista told Davila. It’s also why the book took six years to complete. She needed time to research, write, and fact-check information, especially on topics as critical as terror, war, and the people involved.
Some People Need Killing draws its name from one of Evangelista’s encounters with a vigilante called Simon, who believed in former President Duterte’s “cause”. He is a proud DDS (short for Diehard Duterte Supporters or Davao Death Squad, depending on the context). “I’m really not a bad guy. I’m not all bad. Some people need killing,” he told Evangelista.
As described in its blurb, the book follows the Philippine drug war under Duterte’s regime. Evangelista documented the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of the war on drugs—which led to the deaths of 12,000 Filipinos to date, according to Human Rights Watch. Evangelista wrote in her book that the total is probably much higher, with the highest estimate pegged at about 30,000. She immersed herself in the world of killers and survivors, capturing the atmosphere of terror created “when an elected president decided that some lives were worth less than others.”
“I’m not quite sure why I kept following some stories, only that they were very personal to me and very important. When I was writing the book, I realised it was because it seemed to speak to the bigger question of the war,” Evangelista said in the ANC interview. “While I was doing field reporting, I was asking how people died, who killed them, and their manner of death. But the longer I was covering, it seemed like other questions needed to be asked, which I asked through the book: Why did they have to die? What was the rationale behind it?”
There are several reasons why the people gave Duterte the highest seat in the country, but many would suggest it was because he was a man of his word, with the masses feeling a sense of familiarity with his personality. “He said what he meant, and he meant what he said,” as mentioned in the book. According to a study by Mark Thompson, his violent populism, which he first showed as mayor of Davao, wooed voters instead of intimidating them. His promises of protecting “good people” against the “drug-induced evil” touched the hearts of the masses, and his appeals resonated, given the failures of the previous administrations to satisfy social unrest.