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Over the years, I’ve had the honor of reading and publishing reporters who are as resilient as they are intelligent: Katherine Boo, Jon Lee Anderson—I won’t go on because the list is as long as it is distinguished. It is a cliché to compare such writers to George Orwell or, more lately, with justice, Martha Gellhorn. But, if the shoe fits . . . Recently, a Filipina reporter named Patricia Evangelista came by the office, for an interview for The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Our topic was her new book, “Some People Need Killing,” about the reign of Rodrigo Duterte. It is hardly written with Orwellian cool, but it stands next to “Homage to Catalonia.” Evangelista’s title comes from a vigilante, whose offhand comment to her exemplified the bloodiness of the Duterte Presidency and its extralegal drug wars. Evangelista covered the killings, which left thousands dead, for the independent news platform Rappler. The site was co-founded by the journalist Maria Ressa, who, along with Dmitry Muratov, won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago.
Ressa would surely be the first to say that there would have been no Nobel, and very little truth in the Duterte era, were it not for the meticulous reporting of Evangelista and others like her. Evangelista was on the street every night, surveying the horror, examining the corpses, talking to the grieving families, and prodding the police. She wrote news pieces, and she wrote longer investigations. Now, in “Some People Need Killing,” she has written a journalistic masterpiece. She is a very rare talent; our conversation below was blunt—“Can I curse?”—and open. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book is one of the most remarkable pieces of narrative nonfiction I have read in a long, long time. But let’s start with you: you were a staff writer at a newspaper in the Philippines that has a reputation for intense independence, and rare independence. Tell me how your career started.
Well, I’ve been a trauma journalist for more than a decade. That means I go to places where people die. I pack my bags, I interview the survivors, I file my stories. And then I go home, to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.
For most of the time I spent as an investigative reporter for Rappler, I covered disasters, I covered massacres. I covered the aftermath of internal conflict. And, in 2016, a man named Rodrigo Duterte ran for the Presidency of the Philippines.
He ran on a platform of death, and that’s not an exaggeration. He promised that the fish would feed fat on the corpses of criminals. He said morticians would grow rich with a deluge of dead. He said that if your neighbor’s child is an addict, to kill them yourselves. It would be a kindness to their parents.
Duterte won.
There’s not a country I can think of without a drug-addiction problem, without a drug-trafficking problem. What was Duterte running against, and why?
Well, when he ran, things were generally stable, so to speak. So it was necessary to create a spectre that he could run against. The Philippines has a drug problem, as most countries do, but comparative studies will demonstrate that we have less than half the global average when it comes to drug use.
But that wasn’t the picture Duterte painted. He painted a picture of drug dealers leaving the country in shambles. He said that every drug addict was schizophrenic, hallucinatory. That he will rape your mother and butcher your father, and, if he can’t find a child to rape, he’ll rape a goat. And he said, if you don’t believe it, if you don’t believe how terrible they are, that he would give you drugs himself. Feed them to your children, and watch them become monsters.
He was elected in 2016.
Yes.
Not a good year for democracy.
Not quite.
How would you compare Duterte to Donald Trump? Or would you?
Well, certainly they make promises. But there are charismatic men all over the world who will make promises, who will say outrageous things, and people will laugh, and they will draw crowds. And sometimes it’s funny.
Then they say more terrible things. Kill the drug addicts. And people will find that maybe a little acceptable, because they make life terrible. And then later they’ll say, Kill the activists, and then kill the journalists, and then kill whoever it is. So are they similar men? Certainly in that they like the outrageous, and they like the applause, and they know how to entertain a crowd.
Perhaps one of the differences is that Duterte keeps his promises. Not all of them—he didn’t end drugs in the Philippines, or criminality, or corruption; but he said, “Kill them all,” and people died.
This is a quote, “Kill them all,” and it resounds through your book like a ghostly chorus. You used the phrase “drug pusher” in the book, but this phrase includes a number of people, including drug users.
Yes. In Filipino, Duterte calls them “durugistas,” meaning drug dealers, drug users, junkies. Sometimes, he even refers to people who want to protect individuals who are castigated for using drugs that way. So, it can be any sort of association.
Now tell me about Rappler, the publication you were writing for. Maria Ressa is the famous editor of it, co-winner of the Nobel Prize. Tell me about how you started working on the Duterte regime’s brutality, what your daily life was like, and what kind of danger you were in day to day.
What was good about working for Rappler was that there was no editor who said, “Step back, it’s dangerous.” Maria was something like a lightning rod. When the government was angry, they directed the anger at her. Those of us in the field had the freedom to cover what we needed to cover. We were small-staffed. We had very few resources. We had two cars.
Two cars.
Two cars.
How many people on the staff?
Reporters? Fewer than twenty.
Tiny.
Tiny. And, to answer your question, about why I started covering the drug war: we saw it coming. Early on, I was doing analysis for Rappler, looking at the narratives that the Presidential candidates were using to sell themselves. The final story I wrote before the election was called “The Rapture of Rodrigo Duterte.”And I thought I went terribly purple on that piece. The final line was: “The streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte is elected.” And I regretted that line, because I thought it was too dramatic.
And then I was standing by the side of a road, and there was a body on the ground, and I stepped over the gutter, and the blood ran red over my boots. And then I understood. And the only way I could survive that on a daily basis was that, at the height of the drug war, when there were corpses every night, was to—
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