Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is not an easy read. An account of genocide is never an easy read. Now, some may quibble that former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s taking the lives of only (!) 27,000 people does not qualify as genocide. But Duterte himself knew it was genocide he was unleashing on his country when, in the third month of his war on drugs, he made his celebrated remark: “Hitler massacred three million Jews… Now, there are three million drug addicts…I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
Because it is an account of genocide, I would be surprised if Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing were to become a bestseller in my country. For many Filipinos now want to forget the Duterte years, treating them as a nightmare from which they have fortunately awakened. And, indeed, for a very large number, among them avid readers of bestsellers, the book will be an unwelcome reminder that they had a hand in bringing the man to power.
That many of Evangelista’s compatriots will consider the book a repository of memories that are best left in slumber is unfortunate since they will not encounter the unforgettable characters that she profiles in painstaking detail. There is, of course, Duterte, who does not hesitate to tell his audiences, “There will be blood,” or something to that effect, that invariably triggers their enthusiastic applause. There is Evangelista’s main contact in the police force, a Colonel Domingo, who revels in her portrayal of him as an all-knowing malignant presence in an article even as he distances himself from the actual snuffing of lives. There is Simon, a vigilante to whom the killing of suspected drug dealers and users is subcontracted by the police, who tells Evangelista, “I’m really not a bad guy…I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”
But for this reviewer, the most distressing—and poignant—case is that of Normy Lopez, the mother of Djastin, an epileptic brutally gunned down by the police in one of those executions they tried to pass off as a result of “resistance” on the part of the victim. Normy, however, was not one to take the murder of her son sitting down. She sought justice through the Commission on Human Rights, through the courts, and she succeeded in getting the murderer identified and charged.
Then, her determination to get justice for her son faltered, and the reason was not a threat from the police but........