BOOK REVIEW: SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING—A Memoir of Murder in my Country

by Rose Cruz Churma

Rodrigo Duterte took office as President of the Republic of the Philippines in 2016. The former president generally speaks extemporaneously, unwilling to read from prepared remarks.  

At the beginning of the book one of his quotes is inscribed: “What I want to do is instill fear” when he was still the mayor of Davao, a city in southern Philippines.

In one speech, he promises to “kill people” and uses the word “kill” in his speeches 1,254 times—based on the database of transcripts from his speeches from June 2016 to June 2017 — in just a year. The total number during his presidency is likely higher.

From the beginning of the Duterte era, it became the author’s role to document the people killed in this supposed war on drugs. She was a field correspondent for Rappler, the online newspaper founded by Nobel Peace Prize awardee Maria Ressa.

She was one of the reporters covering the results of Duterte’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 author describes it best when she says, “This is a book about the dead and the people who are left behind.”

But it is also her personal story written in her own voice as she struggled through her fears and the paranoia she developed from covering these EJKs (extra-judicial killings), and a presidency that condoned—even encouraged—state-sanctioned massacres.

The last sentence in the book’s prologue haunted me when she wrote—“…I am 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.”

It is so difficult to wrap around my head the fact that despite these acts of brutality especially to the most vulnerable, Duterte’s popularity remained high, catapulting his daughter and political heir to the second-highest office of the nation.

This book is a memoir as well as a report of what happened in the past. It tries to explain the origins of autocratic rule and Filipinos’ preference for leaders with a “strong-man” persona. In reading the book, one can gauge the cynicism of the voters, and the opportunism of the politicians that rule them.

The subject matter is dark and depressing. I had to stop so many times just to process objectively what I was reading. As you read it you wonder, is this my country of birth? What have we devolved into?

Her writing style—short, clear sentences describe in searing detail the poverty, corruption and cruelty of those in power. It is able to capture the killings and their aftermath in a very matter-of-fact way, but the rage is there, lurking among the commas and translations of new words coined during this era: “salvage,” “neutralize,” “encounter,”—the more euphemistic synonym for “kill.”

The author, Patricia Evangelista, is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for Rappler. Her work has earned a number of local and international accolades, especially for her reporting on the aftermath of super typhoon Haiyan and Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.

She first gained international attention when she won the 2004 Best Speaker award in the International Public Speaking Competition conducted by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) in London. At that time, she was an eighteen-year-old college student. The title of her piece was “Blonde and Blue Eyes, The Filipino Diaspora.”

She received her high school diploma from St. Theresa’s College in Quezon City before enrolling in UP Diliman’s College of Mass Communication.

She was first published as a youth columnist by The Philippine Star. She had her start in television journalism as a production assistant for ABS-CBN and went on to produce a number of programs and documentaries, including the groundbreaking narrative series, Storyline.

In October 2023, her first book was published, Some People Need Killing, which The New Yorker calls a journalistic masterpiece.

This book is worth reading—if at all to make us think—but also act: what can we do to ensure that state-sanctioned killings never happen again?

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ROSE CRUZ CHURMA established Kalamansi Books & Things three decades ago. It has evolved from a mail-order bookstore into an online advocacy with the intent of helping global Pinoys discover their heritage by promoting books of value from the Philippines and those written by Filipinos in the Diaspora. We can be reached at kalamansibooks@gmail.com.