Some People Need Killing is former Rappler reporter Patricia Evangelista's account of Duterte's drug war.
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The story is familiar to everyone. Duterte was elected as president of the Philippines in 2016 on the promise of killing drug users and criminals and cleaning up the country. As Duterte warned:
“I’m telling the Filipino people, not me,” said the mayor. “It’s going to be bloody, because I will not sit there as president and just like any other regime, say, ‘That’s all I can do.’ If you put me there, do not fuck with me.”
But, Patricia notes, none of Duterte's supporters took his words literally. In fact to believe anything he said was to be meshed in a net of contradictions.
To vote for Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe in certain things. You had to believe, for example, that he was a righteous man. You had to believe he wasn’t a rapist, and didn’t want to be a rapist. You had to believe he was poor, or was once poor, or had lived with the poor. You had to believe in destiny. You had to believe in God. You had to believe that God had a peculiar preference for deadly autocrats, because the presidency is destiny and Rodrigo Duterte was destined to lead.
To believe in Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe he was brave. You had to believe he would cut America out of military agreements and that Barack Obama was a son of a bitch. You had to fear China, or you had to love China, or you had to believe, in the face of China’s territorial aggression, that Rodrigo Duterte was willing to ride a Jet Ski out into the open sea to plant a flag on the disputed islands China had seized.
To believe in Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe he was a killer, or that he was joking when he said he was a killer. You had to believe in the specter of a narco state, or you had to believe that he was only playing to the crowd. You had to believe drug addiction is criminal, that drug addicts are not human, and that their massacre can be considered acceptable public policy. You had to believe he could make crime and corruption and illegal drugs disappear in three to six months. You had to believe that a mayor who kept peace by ordering undesirables out of his city could succeed in a country where undesirables were citizens too. You had to believe the intended dead would be drug lords and rapists, only drug lords and rapists, and not your cousins who go off into Liguasan Marsh to pick up their baggies of meth. You had to believe there would be a warning before the gunshots ring out.
To believe in Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe he was just. You had to believe he was honest. You had to believe he was untainted by the oligarchy and beholden to no one. You had to believe he was your father. You had to believe he was your savior. You had to believe he loved you, because you love him enough to carry his name.
Months before the election Patricia collaborated on a Rappler series profiling each candidate and imagining how their presidency would play out. Of Duterte Patrica wrote:
In the three months before the presidential election, I collaborated on an opinion series with the sociologist Nicole Curato. The Imagined President was a series of presidential profiles published in Rappler, mapping the narrative arcs of every presidential candidate. We compared myth with reality in an attempt to understand what resonated with the voting public.
The final installment was published on May 2, seven days before the elections. It ended with a warning: “If Rodrigo Duterte wins,” we wrote, “his dictatorship will not be thrust upon us. It will be one we will have chosen for ourselves. Every progressive step society has made has been diminished by his presence. Duterte’s contempt for human rights, due process, and equal protection is legitimized by the applause at the end of every speech. We write this as a warning. The streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte keeps his promise. Take him at his word—and know you could be next.”
I regretted those sentences within a day of publication. They were sensational, colorful, with none of the restraint expected of working journalists. I would have expunged them if I could.
On June 30, 2016, we became Duterte. The streets ran red.
The rest of the book is mostly a catalogue of how the streets ran red.
Patricia documents particular killings, the involvement of vigilante groups such as the Confederate Sentinels Group (CSG), the attitude of the PNP, the deception of the PNP and their involvement in the killings, and her own journalistic endeavors.
It is a matter of record that Duterte promised cops they would not be prosecuted for murder so long as they were doing their duty.
The president offered every cop a promise. He would believe them if they claimed to have killed in the performance of duty. Every cop charged and convicted who followed his orders would be pardoned. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to kill for as long as it’s those idiots, if they start to fuck with your city.”
So, the killings began. Every night the bodies piled up with each time the cops claiming the dead pulled a gun and the killing was done in self-defense as their duty. Analyzing many individual cases Patricia notes the PNP was getting an unbelievably high and accurate kill ratio:
More than a hundred suspects “who yielded” were arrested. All thirty- two suspects who offered armed resistance were shot and killed. There were no injured cops. There were no wounded suspects. To believe this narrative is to believe that local cops clocked a 100 percent kill rate, higher than the already improbable 97 percent reported by a Reuters investigative team in 2016, higher than the 83 percent of the notorious police shootings in Rio de Janeiro.
“Luckily,” wrote one Bulacan lieutenant colonel, “there were no casualties on the PNP side.”
Were they murders? The cops did not call these deaths murders. If they were not murders, was every Bulacan policeman, including the rawest of recruits, a marksman of such astonishing talent that every random armed encounter was met with such fatal accuracy? If they were not murders, how was it possible that police reported no casualties after twenty-five separate gunfights inside a single twenty-four-hour period? And if they were not murders, did every suspect who shot at the police miss the target?
Luck, said the police.Good, said the president.
Patricia spends a good deal explaining how language was subverted, not just to describe the drug war, but also in everyday parlance. Take for instance the word "salvage."
There are other terms for this. Extrajudicial killing. Vigilante-style murder. Targeted assassination. In the Philippines, a specific word evolved for this specific sort of death. The word is salvage.
Contronyms are Janus words, two-faced and adversarial. An alarm can turn off, or it can go off. A moon might be out as the lights go out. Contronyms mean the opposite of themselves, occupying an abstract category of the English language. He left; she was left. He ran fast; she held fast. He sanctioned the killings; she sanctioned the killers.
Salvage, in my country, is a contronym. It is a hopeful word everywhere else. To salvage is to rescue, regardless of whether the salvaged is a ship or a soul. Salvage and salvation are rooted in the same word—salvus, “to save.” So sayeth the book of Luke: “And Jesus said to him, this day is salvation come to this house, as much as he also is a son of Abraham, for the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
During the drug war no one was killed, they were neutralized.
Here is another word for death. The word is neutralized.
Project Double Barrel, laid out in Command Memorandum Circular No. 16-2016, seeks, among other goals, the “neutralization of illegal drug personalities nationwide.” Human rights lawyers argue it is an order to kill.
On the basis of that word, they have challenged the entire drug war apparatus at the high court.
Nowhere in the memorandum, or elsewhere in Philippine law, is the word neutralization defined. “Neutralize means to kill,” wrote the lawyers of the Free Legal Assistance Group.
The government insisted that to neutralize meant only “to overcome resistance.” Whether that meant to disable or to kill depended on the exigencies of the moment. Those moments are many. Twenty-six-year-old Raymond Yumul of Concepcion in Tarlac was neutralized. Jeffrey Cruz of Carcel Street in Quiapo was neutralized. Samar native Wilfredo Chavenia was “neutralized while the other suspect managed to escape.” John Ryan Baluyot of Olongapo City was “completely neutralized.” Two unnamed male suspects, distinguished only by the color of their shirts—one white, one gray—were both neutralized. Fernando Gunio of Quezon City, who “sensed the presence of police operatives,” allegedly pulled out a handgun and fired, forcing the police to “neutralize the said suspect.” Forty-two- year-old Arnel Cruz and fifty-one-year-old Oliver Reganit “were neutralized before they could hide in the middle of the cornfield.” Renato dela Rosa, alias Jay-jay Toyo, after allegedly opening fire, was cornered and “subsequently neutralized by the responding police officers.”
Each of these men is dead, but in the official reports of all these cases, none of them were referred to in the narrative of events as killed. They were neutralized, verb and noun, as was narrated by the Bulacan officers who shot Justine Bucacao and Bernard Lizardo: “Neutralized suspects sustained gunshot wounds on different parts of their bodies.”
Then there is the word "good." Duterte called the drug war killings "maganda 'yun." But as Patricia informs us Duterte did not mean the killings were "good" he meant they were "beautiful."
“Thirty-two died early in Bulacan in a massive raid,” said President Duterte. “Maganda ‘yun.”
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.
Those of us who wrote of the president and his frequent incitements to violence did so in good faith, offering the benefit of the doubt to a man whose rambling threats had come to target members of the free press. We translated his putang ina into “son of a bitch” instead of “son of a whore.”
We repeated his spokespersons’ smiling excuses, their explanations that the president should be taken “seriously, not literally,” that his words required “creative imagination” in their interpretation, and that it was only “heightened bravado” that had him encouraging his soldiers to rape on the battlefield.
I quoted the president’s statement on my own social media page: “ ‘Thirty-two died early in Bulacan in a massive raid,’ said President Duterte. ‘That’s good.’ ”
A reader left a comment. “For the record, he did not say 32 dead was a good thing,” he wrote. “Duterte said it was beautiful. Let not the perversity be lost in translation.”
Here then is what the president said in the late afternoon of August 16, 2017.
“Thirty-two died early in Bulacan in a massive raid. That’s beautiful. If we can kill another thirty-two every day, then maybe we can reduce what ails the country.”
It is rather odd that Patricia speaks of writing "the President and his frequent incitements to violence did so in good faith, offering the benefit of the doubt." After already noting that he threatened to kill and after writing a profile warning "the streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte keeps his promise. Take him at his word." What benefit of the doubt was there to give except to take him at his word which she says is literal?
During Duterte's term and even now the argument rages on whether Duterte ever ordered the cops to kill anyone. Yet, that is exactly what happened as soon as he was elected. Why? Because he told the cops to do so. Likewise the killings stopped when Duterte told the cops to stop killing. This came about because of the killing of South Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo.
The story made the international news. The South Korean embassy called for an investigation. The Senate held hearings. Two police officers were charged with, one later convicted of, the crime kidnapping with homicide. There were reports the victim’s head had been wrapped in packing tape and his corpse cremated—before a panicked funeral parlor employee flushed the ashes down a toilet.
It was seven months after the declaration of the drug war. More than seven thousand were dead, and only then was Rodrigo Duterte finally willing to concede his cops had done wrong. “I apologize for the death of your compatriot,” he told the South Korean government in a public address. “We are very sorry that it had to happen.”
The chief of the Philippine National Police, Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, stood before the media and said the police would “focus on internal cleansing.” He said he would have preferred to kill the cops involved, if only it were legal. He called the crime offensive. He would “melt in shame if I could.”
President Rodrigo Duterte called the incident an embarrassment but refused Dela Rosa’s offer to resign. On January 30, 2017, the president suspended the same police institution he had empowered from participation in the war against drugs. Police antidrug units were dissolved. He called the police “the most corrupt, corrupt to the core.” He called them criminals. The war would continue, but there would be no more police operations against illegal drugs.
On that night, every drug war journalist I knew gathered at the press office of the Manila Police District. We waited. There were no crime scenes that night. No drug addict died; no dealer was shot. Not in Manila, not in Caloocan, not in Cebu or Navotas or the slums of Quezon City. The president had spoken, and for the first time in seven months—with the exception of Christmas Day—no new names were added to the death count. It came as no surprise that the cops kept their guns holstered, but the vigilantes did too. There were no salvagings, no drive-by shootings, no masked gunmen kicking down doors of suspected meth dealers. The uniformed militia stood down, and so did, if the reports were to be believed, the killers they employed. The death toll stopped at 7,080.
The war, or what had been called the war, ended with the flush of a toilet.
How can anyone read that and come away with any other conclusion than the PNP was working off the orders of Duterte?
The book ends with a discussion of how many were killed during the drug war and profiles the regret of several former Duterte supporters. Needless to say the exact number of the dead will never be known.
I cannot, with any certainty, report the true toll of Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs. Numbers cannot describe the human cost of this war, or adequately measure what happens when individual liberty gives way to state brutality. Even the highest estimate—over 30,000 dead—is likely insufficient to the task.
When the intention is to lie, numbers can make extraordinary liars. Even government agencies fail to agree on how many the police killed in alleged antidrug operations. The PNP’s Directorate for Operations put those deaths at 7,884 in August 2020. The government’s communications office, two years later, lowered the total to 6,252 in May 2022. The last of the DUI numbers was released in 2019, but the number is meaningless in determining drug-related deaths, conflated as it is with every possible variation of homicide.
The truth is almost certainly much higher. A study by Columbia University’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism estimated that government figures were “a gross underestimation of the extent of drug- related killings in the Philippines.” The Supreme Court demanded all documents on the “total of 20,322 deaths during the Duterte administration’s anti-drug war.” The Commission on Human Rights chairperson Chito Gascon said the number of drug-related deaths could go “as high as 27,000.” International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said that “between 12,000 and at least 20,000 killings” were committed in relation to the drug war.
Of course all these numbers are called baseless propaganda by the government.
While Patricia writes a compelling narrative about the facts of the drug war one thing she does not do is offer a reason as to why it happened. She gives a "what" but not a mechanism of "why." Perhaps one quote from the book offers insight. At the funeral of one drug war victim several people dressed like PNP officers showed up. But they were not cops. They were "force multipliers" going by the name of Philippines Hotline Movement Incorporated (PHMI). One observer commented:
“They look like idiots,” Vincent Go said, when I caught a ride with him to the cemetery. “That’s the thing with Filipinos. They put on a uniform, and suddenly they think they’re kings. Even during the pandemic, even in the villages, even if they’re just security guards. They’re so proud of their outfits, their vests, something changes inside of them. Clueless morons thinking they’re enforcing the law, but really they have no goddamn clue what they’re doing.”
Why did the drug war happen as it did? Why did the PNP kill with impunity and why do they continue to be a corrupt organization? Because of those uniforms which imbue them with a sense of superiority and bestows upon them their power. They are cops, a brotherhood, who can do whatever they want without consequence because they stand above the crowd. As Gaspar de San Augustin wrote in 1720:
43. They act tyrannically one toward another. Consequently, the Indian who has some power from the Spaniard is insolent and intolerable among, them—so much so that, in the midst of their ingratitude, some of them recognize it, although very few of them. Yet it is a fact that, if the Spaniards had not come to these islands, the Indians would have been destroyed; for, like fish, the greater would have swallowed the lesser, in accordance with the tyranny which they exercised in their paganism.
During the Referendum of 1599 Filipinos thanked the Spanish from saving them from the tyranny of their chiefs.
The bishop of Nueva Segovia, Don Fray Pedro de Soria, collected those Indians together, by order of his Majesty, and told them of the advantages of the Spanish monarchy, and how beneficial it would be for them to have Don Felipe, the king of the Spaniards, as their king, who would protect them peacefully and with justice. The chiefs answered not a word to this. Thereupon, the bishop spoke again and asked them whether they had understood the words he had spoken to them, and if they would answer. Thereupon a clownish Indian arose and said: “We answer that we wish the king of España to be our king and sovereign, for he has sent Castilians to us, who are freeing us from the tyranny and domination of our chiefs, as well as fathers who aid us against the same Castilians and protect us from them.”
https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-philippine-referendum-of-1599.html
In the Philippines it has always been the way of the ruling class to oppress the masses even before the Spanish arrived. The tendency towards tyrannical rule is in the blood of Filipinos.
But rare, non-existent really, is the journalist, the writer, the researcher who will investigate the Philippines by noting racial characteristics unique to Filipinos and extrapolating from those traits a reason for Filipino society being the way it is. Thankfully Gaspar de San Augustin was not afraid to do so.
