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. The language failed as the body count rose.

When I think about the Philippines, the first thing that comes to mind is shoes. Remember how crazily astounding Imelda Marcos was? I was in primary school when Ferdinand Marcos was President but even then, I recognised an abuse of power.

Patricia Evangelista’s book, Some People Need Killing, begins with Marcos and then goes on to describe the military and public protests that led to the People Power Revolution, which removed Marcos and installed the popular Corazon Aquino as president. Aquino developed a new constitution which limited presidential power, including creating a single-term limit. Political instability followed and the fragility of the democratic institutions remained for decades afterwards, ultimately exploited under the regime of Rodrigo Duterte.

Duterte was in office from 2016 until 2022. During his presidency, his domestic policy focused on combating the illegal drug trade by initiating a ‘war’ on drugs.

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.

The war was fought with state-sanctioned killings carried out by police, as well as killings by vigilantes. Thousands of citizens were slaughtered. Evangelista reminds the reader that Duterte was admired by many – ‘…one day the man who would be president promised the deaths of his own citizens. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause…’. He was elected on the basis that he would reduce crime and corruption, and bring back order to the Philippines.

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.

Evangelista is a journalist. Prior to chronicling the killings, she covered the trauma of natural disasters (of which the Philippines has many, specifically typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides).

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. I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bags ran out. They are hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. 

While this book focuses on particular murders, it is also Evangelista’s personal story, written in her 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.’ 

Evangelista pays specific attention to words and language. The blurb describes her ‘dissection of the grammar of violence’. She writes with such precision and her recognition of the power of language, which shaped the legal and cultural landscape dramatically under Duterte, demonstrates how a democratically-elected official gets away with the killing of thousands of his own people.

George Orwell’s contribution to understanding autocrats everywhere is necessary here. The word is doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously while accepting both. It was, Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the power “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.” It was to use facts only when convenient, to disavow their existence when contradictory, and “to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” How dare the cops murder? How dare they not kill? Thus, the Orwellian lie, stripped of its subtleties.

When I say ‘words and language’, I mean the nitty-gritty. She focuses on transitive vs. intransitive verbs, the active vs. passive voice, the use of different words and phrases police use to describe the murder of suspected drug users, and the implications of all of those choices. The result makes for harrowing reading.

 “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…. “Simple justice,” he said. “Not murder-murder”” 

In Filipino, maganda means ‘beautiful’. It can also mean ‘good’. It was unclear what the president meant that afternoon in August, but there was a reason every English-language local news organization chose to use the word good instead of beautiful. Good, as egregious a judgment as it was, was far less outrageous than beautiful. Beautiful would have offered an element of pleasure, a romanticizing of brutality, the impression that the commander in chief of a democratic republic was not just pleased but delighted by the ruthless killing of his citizens. 

The descriptions of the killings aren’t particularly graphic, however, the inclusion of small details – what the person was wearing, what they were doing when murdered – and the reaction of the families made for tough reading.

I discovered that I had spent a decade seeing death in slow motion. I had built moments movement by movement: the head turning, the arm rising, the finger jerking on the trigger. I packed in detail with every death. I traced the flight of the bullet from autopsy reports and witness testimony. I listed the witnesses, noted the reactions, integrated what someone had thought and seen and heard into walls of text attempting to reconstruct the last minutes of a man’s life. The truth was simpler: It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.

Evangalista’s own story elevated this book – in less skilled hands, it would have been a distraction. However, like Patrick Radden Keefe’s particular knack for narrative nonfiction (I draw that comparison only because Say Nothing stays in my mind years after reading), Evangalista weaves in details that make this story difficult to forget.

3.5/5