From the very first page, ‘Some People Need Killing’ by Patricia Evangelista plunges readers into the chilling reality of a country plagued by extrajudicial killings. This gripping memoir uncovers the harrowing truths of a society torn apart by sanctioned violence.
Dive deeper into the heart-wrenching stories and fearless journalism that ‘Some People Need Killing’ offers—discover how a nation grapples with the aftermath of a brutal campaign against its own people.
Table of Contents
Genres
History, Biography, Memoir, Society, Culture, Nonfiction, Politics, True Crime, Asia, Crime, Investigative Journalism, Human Rights, Autobiography
‘Some People Need Killing’ is a memoir by Patricia Evangelista, documenting the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. It details the deaths of thousands at the hands of death squads and vigilantes, often encouraged by Duterte himself. The book provides a narrative of the victims’ families and the perpetrators, offering a stark look at the human cost of Duterte’s war on drugs and crime.
Review
Patricia Evangelista’s ‘Some People Need Killing’ is a profound and unsettling account of the Philippines’ descent into violence under Duterte. With meticulous reporting and evocative prose, Evangelista captures the fear and grief of a nation where death became a state policy. The book has been recognized for its literary merit and journalistic integrity, earning a place among the best books of 2023 by The New York Times and Time Magazine. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the consequences of populist rhetoric and the human capacity for both violence and resistance.
Introduction: A meditation on state violence
Some People Need Killing (2023) is a detailed and empathetic chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war between 2016 and 2022. It records the murders perpetrated by police and vigilantes during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, which resulted in thousands of deaths. Delving into the lives of both perpetrators and victims, Evangelista captures the climate of fear created by a government that believed that “some people need killing.”
In 2016, the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, declared a war on drugs. Over the next six years, police and armed vigilantes killed between 7,000 and 25,000 people. Most of the victims of this war were financially impoverished men suspected of using or dealing drugs.
Investigative journalist Patricia Evangelista asks, How can a state kill so many people while retaining the support of so many ordinary citizens? In Some People Need Killing, she picks apart the systemic violence that was used to justify this brutal killing spree.
Hailed by the New Yorker as a “journalistic masterpiece,” Evangelista’s work on the drug war is a devastating chronicle of state terror – and a monument to its victims.
Content and trigger warnings: This summary discusses murder and gun violence throughout. Section 2 describes one account of child sexual abuse, strong sexual language, and murder. Section 4 contains a strong sexual term; and graphically describes murder and attempted murder. Section 5 describes kidnapping of an adult and murder. Please take care of yourself when reading or listening.
A pledge to kill
Rodrigo Duterte told a simple and compelling story about what had gone wrong in the Philippines: Poverty. Crime. Corruption. All the problems plaguing ordinary Filipinos, he said, were caused by illegal drugs. It was the durugistas – a catch-all term for addicts, users, and pushers – who were to blame for everything from failing schools to dangerous neighborhoods.
Drugs, asserted Duterte, made people paranoid, heartless, and mindless. Addicts robbed, stole, and extorted to get their fix and raped and murdered when they were high. Duterte said there were 3 million – no, 4.5 million – drug-crazed Filipinos. If your neighbor’s kid is a junkie, he told his supporters, you should kill them – you’d be doing their parents a favor by putting that monster down.
In the mouth of another politician, these words might have been little more than rabble-rousing rhetoric. But Duterte meant it. For many voters, this was the appeal. Since the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, Filipino politics had been dominated by respectable career politicians. Liberal reforms had been locked in and the economy had grown but the spoils were unevenly distributed. While the middle class prospered, impoverished Filipinos felt abandoned.
Duterte, the self-styled man of the people, ridiculed the high-minded talk of wealthy liberals – they didn’t understand the world beyond their gated communities, he said. Human rights didn’t cut it in the crime-infested neighborhoods where most Filipinos lived. The only way to help ordinary citizens was to eliminate the scourge of illegal drugs. And the only language junkies and dealers understand is force. To Duterte, it was mercilessly simple: some people need killing.
To hell with the bureaucrats and the bleeding hearts, Duterte said – they got us into this mess. He promised to fix it and replace rehabilitation with retribution. His plan was to kill all 4.5 million of the so-called drug-crazed citizens. Morticians, he claimed, would grow rich during his time in office.
Distressingly, Duterte’s pledge to kill won him the presidency in 2016. Thousands of durugistas were gunned down by the police during his six-year term. Officially, these were violent desperados resisting arrest. In reality, most raids targeted small-time crooks and users and went down like executions rather than attempts to apprehend suspects. State-sanctioned vigilantes, meanwhile, added to the death toll: according to human rights organizations, by the end of his presidency in 2022, Duterte’s war on drugs had claimed up to 25,000 lives.
Stories and statistics
Duterte had blood on his hands. That wasn’t an accusation by bleeding-heart liberals – it was his own boast.
Duterte had made his name in local politics. On the campaign trail, he often told a story from his 22-year stint as mayor of Davao City, the largest metropolis in the south Philippines.
In the late ’90s, an 18-month-old infant went missing around Christmas. Her body was found the next day. The police picked up a suspect – a man addicted to shabu, a cheap, Filipino-made methamphetamine. Duterte asked him why he’d done it. “That’s really how I am,” the man supposedly said. “Sometimes, when I’ve got no one to fuck, I end up fucking goats.”
Duterte asked his supporters what they would have done in his position. Then he asked them to guess what he did. He never spelled it out but he always mentioned a gift he’d received that Christmas – a snub-nosed Ruger revolver. The timing, he said, had been “exactly right.”
Duterte’s story is unverifiable. What we do know is this: Between 1998 and 2006, vigilantes calling themselves the Davao Death Squad executed over 800 small-time drug dealers and petty thieves, most of them street kids. According to Human Rights Watch, the Squad worked off a list provided to them by local police with the mayor’s approval.
The story he told about that Christmas in Davao had a simple moral: addicts were monstrous baby-killers. According to Duterte, there were millions of them. Eliminating 800 had made his city safe. As president, he would make the nation safe by killing many more.
Was there really a multi-million-strong army of junkies terrorizing the Philippines? Official statistics didn’t bear out the soon-to-be president’s claims.
According to the UN, on average, 3.5 percent of every population uses illegal drugs. Duterte claimed that the average held true for the Philippines – that’s how he came up with the number of 4.5 million. In reality, there were fewer Filipino drug users than the global average. In fact, the number never exceeded 1.5 percent of the population, and the majority used marijuana, not methamphetamine. Duterte’s claim that addicts had murdered 77,000 people over four years didn’t stack up either. In reality, there were 53,000 murders. Even if you (wrongly) assumed that every death was the work of a meth abuser, the difference was significant.
But for Duterte these numbers were facts justifying the violence he was about to unleash.
Knock and shoot
In the first six months of his presidency, Rodrigo Duterte used the verb “to kill” 1,254 times. It wasn’t empty rhetoric: that was exactly what the state was now doing, officially, and unofficially.
Duterte said the war on drugs was like a double shotgun: one trigger set off two barrels. The first was aimed at high-value targets – the drug lords and kingpins controlling the narcotics trade. The other was fixed on the street-level thugs who pushed and used drugs.
The second “barrel” was called Operation Tokhang. The name combined two Filipino words, toktok and hangyo, meaning “knock” and “plead.” Police would draw up lists of suspects, knock on their doors, and give them a chance to surrender. Those who took up this “offer” would confess their sins, swear to abandon crime, and plead for mercy.
That was the idea, anyway. In reality, a knock on the door became synonymous with death. Sometimes, it was masked vigilantes standing on the other side. It didn’t matter if the person opening it had already surrendered – they were gunned down all the same. So were bystanders who tried to intervene. Before pulling the trigger, witnesses remembered, the killers uttered two words: Duterte kami, “We are Duterte.”
Other times, it was police with badges. The “human rights people,” Duterte said, were claiming that the police went door-to-door executing suspects. They were wrong. What else could police do, he asked, but respond in kind when meth addicts shot at them? Police reports echoed Duterte’s narrative. They followed a set pattern: Officers knocked on suspect’s door. Suspect opened fire. Officers returned fire. Suspect was killed.
There were thousands of these reports, each one documenting Filipino police officers’ supposedly unerring marksmanship. On August 15, 2017, for example, police in Bulacan – a province near the capital Manila – were involved in 32 firefights resulting from 32 knock-and-plead operations. Amazingly, not a single officer was injured. Nor, for that matter, were any suspects: each one was instantly killed by a fatal shot to the heart or head.
Trigger-happy desperados, in other words, were firing bullets at the police in an attempt to evade capture but every shot they fired missed its target. The police, meanwhile, were racking up 100-percent kill rates with each shot. This wasn’t only happening in Bulacan, either – police reports from around the country told the same story. What explained such incredible stats?
It was luck, said police chiefs. Why question it at all?, asked the president – it was good news.
A survivor testifies
Efren Morillo didn’t fit the profile of the durugista created by Rodrigo Duterte.
He wasn’t a violent meth addict, for starters – if he touched drugs at all, it was to smoke pot with friends. Nor was he a drug-pushing mobster terrorizing his city.
Efren did fit the profile of the typical victim of Duterte’s drug war, though: He was poor, young, and precariously employed. But unlike most of those victims, Efren lived to tell his tale.
On August 21, 2016, he visited a friend who owed him $20. Marcelo lived in a run-down house on the outskirts of Quezon City, a large metropolitan area in the north Philippines. After Efren had picked up his money, he decided to join Marcelo and some neighbors for a game of pool in a shaded courtyard. It was hot that day and he hadn’t felt like walking back in the midday sun.
They were still playing when the police burst through the gates. They called the men “drug-pushing sons of whores,” tied their wrists with lengths of cable, and ransacked Marcelo’s house. They found a cell phone, a weighing scale, a bong, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol – but no drugs.
One of the police officers took Efren out back and told him to kneel in the dirt. Efren began pleading for his life. He swore he was a vendor from the city, that he was clean, and that he knew nothing about drugs. “Really?” replied the officer before raising his gun and pulling the trigger.
The bullet slammed into Efren’s chest, just below his heart. He collapsed into the dirt, a pool of blood congealing around him. There were four more shots and then a voice. “Sir,” it said, “one of them’s still breathing.” Two more shots rang out. Then it was quiet.
Efren remained very still and silently prayed. When the police were finally gone, he stumbled into the jungle surrounding the house. It took him nine hours to reach the hospital. The police were already there. They cuffed him to his bed and charged him with assault. It was another four hours before doctors could remove the bullet lodged in his ribs. By the time Efren awoke, the police had already filed their report. It stated that four notorious drug dealers were killed after opening fire on the police. There was just one problem: for once, a witness had survived.
In court, the police officer lied under oath, but the forensic evidence confirmed Efren’s account: the men had been shot while kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. It wasn’t until March 17, 2023, after five years of legal wrangling, that Efren Morillo was finally acquitted.
The war continues
Efren Morillo was an outlier: he lived to tell his tale in his own voice. But when journalists dug into the lives of less fortunate victims of Duterte’s drug war, they found a similar pattern.
The police, it seemed, were acting as judge, jury, and executioner. But it wasn’t organized crime that was taking the hit. Often, the police weren’t even targeting small-time crooks – they were gunning down anyone and everyone associated with drugs, or the people who used them.
Duterte brushed such accusations aside. It was nothing more than the usual bleeding-heart whining, he said. Then came the scandal that ended the drug war – the official one, at least.
A couple of months after the Efren Morillo case, police in Quezon City kidnapped a South Korean businessman called Jee Ick Joo during a fake drug bust. The ransom was set at $90,000 and quickly paid. But the police didn’t release Jee Ick Joo. Panicking, they strangled him to death, cremated his body, and flushed his remains down a toilet.
But they failed to cover their tracks. When the story broke, it triggered a national – and diplomatic – scandal. The Senate held hearings, official apologies were issued to South Korea, and the man’s family was compensated from the state treasury. With the force’s reputation in ruins, Duterte had to concede that “internal cleansing” must be the first priority of the Philippine National Police. In January 2017, the president dismantled the apparatus he had created to execute his drug war. For the first time in seven months, no new names were added to the death count. For a brief moment, the number of victims remained fixed at 7,080.
The war would soon continue, however. In its next phase, the police delegated the dirty work to off-the-books contractors and vigilantes. According to domestic and international human rights groups, by the end of Duterte’s presidency in 2022, this second wave of extrajudicial killings had tripled the total number of deaths. These extraordinary accusations are at the heart of an ongoing investigation being carried out by the International Criminal Court.
Conclusion
It was the stories Rodrigo Duterte told that won him the presidency in the Philippines. His narrative assigned blame to a marginalized group that had little opportunity to seek justice: drug users, addicts, and small-time dealers. If the nation backed him in his crusade against these criminals, Duterte promised the problems faced by ordinary Filipinos would disappear. Most of the casualties were impoverished men merely suspected of being associated with drugs.
After a public scandal, the president dismantled his vicious scheme. However, the killings continued, only through more undercover methods. By the end of his presidency in 2022, Duterte’s efforts culminated in a death toll in the thousands. The killings are still being investigated by the International Criminal Court.
About the Author
Patricia Evangelista