Described by The New Yorker as a ‘journalistic masterpiece,’ Patricia Evangelista’s book is a dedication to objectivity in journalism and the sacredness of life.
They say all stories are love stories. This is true, given how love comes in so many different forms.
Love can be of the romantic kind. The type that sweeps you off your feet and lets loose butterflies in your stomach. The kind that makes it to the Top 10 lists of your favorite streaming provider. Familial love is another type of love, one many Filipinos could relate to.
There’s also love of country, love of animals, the environment, of God or of whatever higher being in whom you put your faith.
But love is not always roses and unicorns, happy families and swoon-worthy endings. There are other forms of love, too—the sinister, excessive kinds: too much love of money, power, violence.
Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing, at first glance doesn’t seem like a love story. The title itself shows no hint of love. But it is a love story. Unlike most other love stories, however, it puts two different kinds of love side-by-side, in stark contrast to each other.
On one end is a former president’s love for brutality, power, and blood. On the other is a prized journalist’s love for the truth. She doesn’t use the word “love” to describe her work, but her dedication to objectivity in journalism, her relentless pursuit of truth, justice, freedom, and sacredness of life, can only be construed as some form of love.
Love-Love from the slums and the butcher from the south
Hailed by critics as “fierce and powerfully written,” Evangelista’s first book is a “meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle” of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war which spanned the whole six years of his term.
And the book actually starts with love. The story of Love-Love to be exact. Love-Love who at 11 years old was orphaned when her Dee and Ma were shot point blank right in front of her eyes, a bullet each through the skull, in the little shack they call home by a man who uttered, “We Are Duterte,” before pulling the trigger.
Maybe journalism won’t save the world. But maybe, just maybe, with simple acts of love—love of truth, freedom, justice, life—each day could be made more bearable, even in the Philippines.
Love-Love’s story paves the way for other stories, with Evangelista deftly interweaving the origins of autocratic rule in the Philippines through her own personal stories on the rise of Duterte’s own tyrannical regime starting in his home turf Davao City until his ascent to the hallowed halls of Malacañang.
Along the way, she tells the stories of drug war victims—all of them dirt poor, all of them suspected to be durugistas, all of them killed because authorities believed that some people need killing.
Evangelista drew the title of the book from one of her informants. During an interview, the man, a Duterte-supporting vigilante who asked to be called by the name “Simon,” said: “I’m not really a bad guy. I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”
How death is deserved by some served as the battle cry of those who killed because they believed that killing would make the streets safer, would keep their little girls from being raped, would rid the country of people that “Tatay Digong” called “those sons of b*tches,” “people who would threaten to destroy my country.”
It is in this context of unspeakable brutality—suspected drug pushers or users gunned down by masked vigilantes while shouting “We are Duterte,” salvaged corpses with their heads wrapped in packaging tape left to rot on a bridge, little ones killed by bullets not meant for them—that Evangelista devoted much of her reportage from 2016 to 2022.
What made everything even more macabre is that the killings were done with the permission of the people that paved the way for Duterte to hold the highest office in the land.
In the book’s prologue, Evangelista writes: “I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine.”
A “dissection of the grammar of violence”
Already a brilliant writer before Duterte’s presidency, Evangelista’s language in the book was influenced by Duterte’s bloody legacy. The carnage has led to her affinity for simple words. “It’s handy to have a small vocabulary in my line of work,” she says. “The names go first, then the casualty counts. Colors are good to get the description squared away. The hill is green. The sky is black. The backpack is purple, and so is the bruising on the woman’s left cheek.”
She adds: “Small words are precise. They are exactly what they are and are faster to type when the battery is running down.”
In so many ways the book is also a love letter of sorts, a tribute to the ones left behind, orphaned, widowed, parents who had to bury their child instead of the other way around.
Such is the brilliance of Evangelista’s prose. The simplicity of the language does not rob her writing of elegance and lyricism. The “small” words add power; they don’t need to hide behind flowery metaphors. Short, simple, straightforward—each word, each phrase, each sentence is a punch to the gut.
As they should very well be. They are reminders of why the horrors she had so carefully chronicled should never be allowed to happen again.
On the other end of the pole, she also dissects how Duterte’s own use of language, or what she calls “a corruption of language,” enabled the carnage that ensued mere hours after he took his oath of office. The first drug war-related death happened on July 1 in Tiaong, Quezon when Jimmy Reformado was shot by “unknown hitmen.”
The New Yorker editor David Remnick, in an interview with Evangelista, described Duterte’s infamous call to action “Kill them all” as a “ghostly chorus” that resounds throughout the book.
Diehard Duterte Supporters or DDS (note that in other contexts DDS could mean Davao Death Squad) run the gamut from those who believed that Duterte’s use of the word “kill” was only a metaphor to stir fear among durugistas, to those who did not only believe the ex-president’s mantra but also acted on it.
And here is how Some People Need Killing is also a warning on the double-edged power of language. Language can be turned into an act—both good or bad. In the case of Duterte’s dysfunctional regime and his blind supporters, it was the latter, with words having been turned into acts of violence, brutality, and impunity.
A love letter to those left behind
But not all is grim and grisly in Evangelista’s work. In so many ways it is also a love letter of sorts, a tribute to the ones left behind, orphaned, widowed, parents who had to bury their child instead of the other way around.
Her book, in fact, is dedicated to them, “the survivors of the drug war, named and unnamed, who have chosen to bear witness.” In her book’s dedication she adds, “Without their courage, this record would not exist.”
The “small” words add power; they don’t need to hide behind flowery metaphors. Short, simple, straightforward—each word, each phrase, each sentence is a punch to the gut.
In her interview with Remnick, she emphasized how she would have liked to honor the people who risked their lives to tell their stories, saying, “They didn’t have to talk to me, and they did. They are living examples of what happens when autocrats and dictators rise, and we let them.”
And Evangelista, who told their stories, continues to risk her life as well.
Reading Some People Need Killing then is a way to honor them—Evangelista and the ones left behind. To honor their truths and their courage in speaking out those truths in the face of grave threats, even to this day.
To honor them is in a way an act of love, love for our country still bruised and battered and traumatized after six years of a brutal regime—only to fall once again under the rule of a former dictator’s son.
And maybe journalism won’t save the world, as Evangelista declares in the same interview. Maybe tomorrow or next year or next week won’t be much better. But maybe, just maybe, with simple acts of love—love of truth, freedom, justice, life—each day could be made more bearable, even in the Philippines, where the streets were once soaked in blood.
Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (Penguin Random House, 2023) is available at Fully Booked for P1,176 (hardbound).
