Duterte’s Cruel Tricks

Before the 2016 election in the Philippines, the journalist Patricia Evangelista pleaded with her readers not to believe the sinister promises of Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte, the leading candidate for president. Duterte, a trash-talking strongman from Davao City, on the southern island of Mindanao, had made a career of deploying cops, prosecutors, and vigilantes to commit violence against “criminals,” especially drug users and dealers, in the name of public safety. Now he was vowing to export this brutal politics to Manila and the rest of the country. Evangelista listened carefully to his speeches:

Vote for people like us, he says. People like you and me. There are many of us. Don’t vote for people who defend criminals.

Forget about the laws protecting human rights. Forget about the regulations made by men. Look up to the sky, and there you will see the eternal justice of God. By what right in the universe do those sons of bitches dare to cook up crystal meth? Where in the vastness of the sky do they find the license to feed drugs to the nation’s children?

He had entered the race to oppose Grace Poe, the adopted daughter of Filipino movie stars and a former US citizen. “I cannot accept an American president,” Duterte said. He was the antithesis of Poe: ruthlessly masculine, Filipino to his core, disdainful of America’s liberal-democratic pieties. As the mayor of Davao, he had overseen the killings of more than 1,400 alleged criminals. “The streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte keeps his promise,” Evangelista wrote. “Take him at his word—and know you could be next.”

Evangelista was working the “night shift”—the drug-war beat—for the Manila-based news website Rappler. Within hours of Duterte’s inauguration, the first victim “was found at three in the morning abandoned in a Tondo back alley,” she writes. “A cardboard sign sat on his chest: I AM A CHINESE DRUG LORD.” The police would later admit that they were killing an average of six “drug suspects” per day. Duterte invited the nation to join him in eliminating “drug pushers” and “addicts.”

His assault recalled other drug wars waged in the US, Mexico, and Thailand: it responded to real concerns over the spread of cheap, toxic substances and related crime, especially in poor areas, yet did little to cure the joblessness, despair, and chronic pain that often lead people to use and sell. (The average monthly income in the Philippines, which has a population of 115 million, is about $314.) Duterte’s battlefields were far from the gated communities of Manila. His drug war’s only tool was punishment, and in this he was singularly unrestrained.

During Duterte’s six-year presidency, his government and supporters killed between 12,000 and 30,000 people; thousands more were tortured, arrested, and imprisoned. His government contorted numbers to cast drugs as the biggest problem in society. Law enforcement exploited the syncretic inventiveness of spoken Filipino to cover acts of unimaginable cruelty. Evangelista offers a partial glossary of this regime: tokhang, a Visayan portmanteau (toktok plus hangyo) for “knock and plead,” meaning house visits made by the police in hunts for small-time suspects; salvage, from the Spanish salvaje, which had morphed into “apprehend and execute without trial”; and nanlaban, “to fight back,” used by activists during martial law and now, under Duterte, “the assumption of resistance in the drug war: you fought, and then you died.”

In her reported memoir, Some People Need Killing, Evangelista writes that the president, with all the cultivated vulgarity of his speech, “did not call for murder, not once. It was a word he avoided with careful precision.” Those even suspected of drug use or drug dealing “would ‘have to perish,’ said the president. They would be ‘wiped out from the face of the earth.’”

Some People Need Killing is both a reporter’s notebook and a contemporary political history of the Philippines. Evangelista pulls from her investigations at Rappler, augmented by diaristic recollections. (“I spent the nights in the mechanical absorption of organized killing.”) She explains in the preface: “This is a book about the dead, and the people who are left behind. It is also a personal story, written in my own voice, as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own.”

Evangelista was born in 1985, the last full year of Ferdinand Marcos’s rule.¹ In 1983, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., the former journalist and exiled opposition leader, had returned to Manila from Harvard, only to be murdered on the tarmac. When Marcos fixed a subsequent election, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos took part in the Edsa Revolution, which finally dethroned him. “My people said that no man should die because a dictator said he must,” Evangelista writes. “They said it in front of guns. They knelt and they sang and they prayed and they were brave, and because they were, I was born free.” (The writing is like this throughout: dramatic and grandiose.) President Reagan welcomed the Marcoses and their billions in loot to Hawaii; Aquino’s widow, Corazon, became president of the Philippines.

During this transition, the Aquino administration installed caretaker bureaucrats throughout the country. In Davao, which had a long history of violence between US-backed government forces and Communist and Islamist rebels, she tapped seventy-year-old Soledad “Soling” Duterte, a schoolteacher and the wife of a former governor. Soling asked that her son Rody, a recent law graduate, take the position instead. In 1988 he was elected mayor, a position he would hold, on and off, until 2016.

Rody had grown up wealthy—in “a house with a cook and a driver and an errand boy and a passel of bodyguards”—yet asserted his distance from the transnational elites of Manila. (If the Philippines had to align with a superpower, he preferred China to the US, the former colonizer.) He claimed to know the struggles of a traumatized population and promised to eliminate petty crime, rape, and murder, even if that meant becoming a murderer himself. Drug users and dealers—especially of shabu, the common term for crystal methamphetamine—were metonyms for criminality.

Evangelista, who was raised in a middle-class, intellectual household near Manila, has the kind of profile Duterte liked to angle himself against. Her grandfather was a journalist and a founding member of the National Press Club of the Philippines, with close ties to the ruling class. “He shared a typewriter with Ninoy and sent bushels of fresh tomatoes to Marcos,” she writes. As a student at the University of the Philippines, she traveled to London to participate in a public-speaking contest, delivering a speech “about the Filipino diaspora and the promise of multicultural cooperation.” Around that time, the Davao Death Squad, a vigilante group associated with Duterte, engaged in what the United Nations has called “a systematic practice of extrajudicial killings.” Yet these horrors were not widely known outside Mindanao.

After graduation, Evangelista worked for the English news channel of ABS-CBN, the country’s dominant TV broadcaster. In 2009 she was dispatched to Maguindanao, a Muslim area of Mindanao, to cover a massacre of fifty-eight people, the majority of whom were journalists. (“I was, at the time, a foreign correspondent in my own country,” she says of her first visit to Duterte’s home region.) She reported to an editor named Glenda Gloria; the head of the newsroom was a former CNN correspondent, Maria Ressa. “Philippine journalism,” Evangelista writes, “is a largely female enterprise.”

This was certainly the case at Rappler, which Ressa and Gloria founded in 2011. Evangelista was one of their first recruits. As a profile in The New York Times Magazine noted, initially “competitors derided the mostly female reporting staff as ‘Rappler-ettes.’” But the site made stars of dogged young investigators like Pia Ranada, who at twenty-five covered Duterte’s campaign “before the rest of the news media caught on.”

Evangelista, the site’s “trauma reporter,” linked Duterte the politician to Duterte the commander of a war against his own people. She observed how he took the crude puffery of electioneering to a macho extreme. He bragged, as part of his platform, about having shot a classmate at law school, or about a bust of Chinese drug suspects in Davao, in which he’d told a police officer to “finish them off.” (The officer did, killing nine and leaving his colleague to kill two more; they split the bounty.) Duterte and Donald Trump, with whom he ascended in parallel, were around the same age and indulged in a similar shtick: hulking shoulders, comedic timing, misogyny, a message of total liquidation. Duterte would quickly become part of a global authoritarian vogue.

What sorts of voters would find this appealing? Evangelista sketches a few profiles. Joy Tan, from a town in Mindanao, had seen family members resort to drugs in the face of conditions beyond their control: “cannon blasts from Camp Abubakar” (rebel fighting); “a riot over the failed delivery of rice supplies”; “the day Super Typhoon Haiyan pounded the province into rubble.” When her brother and cousins sank “so deep into their addictions that they were stealing from the family to buy illegal drugs out of Liguasan Marsh,” she wished for their arrest. Duterte promised to save them all, and Tan was ready to believe: “When Tan saw Duterte on television, ‘it was like seeing Jesus.’”

Jason Quizon—who rose from poverty to become an OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) in the Gulf, supervising a pipeline project—was inspired by Duterte’s campaign against corruption. Just before the election, an extortion scheme that involved the planting of bullets in airport luggage had put OFWs like him in constant fear. “The line between traveling safely and spending weeks in jail had become a narrow one, dependent on the whim of a single airport employee,” Evangelista writes. It was a banal but emblematic dysfunction, which President Benigno Aquino III, son of Ninoy and Corazon, who took office in 2010, mostly ignored. Mayor Duterte stepped into the gap, promising to hire lawyers for scam victims and issuing an ultimatum to Aquino. “What Jason liked was that the mayor was a man of action. That he swore like Jason, spoke like Jason, saw solutions instead of problems, as Jason did.”

Duterte won the presidency by a large margin, in a five-way race. Yet at the same time, Filipinos chose as their vice-president (the two are elected separately) Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer and an ally of Aquino, over Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, the dictator’s son. “The results in that race demonstrated the capricious nature of Philippine democracy”: an authoritarian from Davao was not the same as a dynastic successor. But neither Robredo nor the parliament could stop the new president from pulling the levers of the drug war.

Politicians made kill lists, while police officers and vigilantes were rewarded with cash. (The book’s title comes from something a vigilante says at one point: “I’m really not a bad guy. I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”) Shakedowns were common. Evangelista tells the story of Elena de Chavez, the mother of a young trans woman named Heart who sold tiny amounts of drugs. “It was an enterprise that terrified her mother,” Evangelista writes, but “Heart brushed off the warnings. She said no cop would take notice of a ten-dollar deal. She was wrong.” The police arrested and jailed Heart, then demanded money; de Chavez pawned her husband’s pension to retrieve her daughter. Heart was released, but three days later seven masked gunmen broke into her home and dragged her to a shack down the street. “The man in the lead held his gun with both hands. He ordered everyone back into their homes,” Evangelista writes. De Chavez “found Heart inside an empty house with a bullet in her cheek.”²

Neither local policemen nor vigilante gangs took their orders directly from Duterte. But his mandate filtered down throughout the country.³ Much of her book consists of reconstructed crime scenes, such as the tokhang of Dee and Ma, a married couple suspected of using drugs, in a Manila slum. Ma had so feared the coming of the drug war that she kept their treatment records close at hand. “The baby wailed. Ma wept. She thrust a handful of paper at the man who killed her husband. Here was proof, she sobbed, that they had mended their ways.” The witnesses to this execution were the couple’s eleven-year-old daughter, Love-Love, and a baby curled on Dee’s chest.

Many, many Filipinos risked their lives to speak with Evangelista and other journalists and human rights groups. A few politicians also resisted the drug war, including Leila de Lima, a lawyer and former senator who’d condemned Duterte when he was still in Davao. De Lima was jailed on bogus drug charges from 2017 until she was allowed to post bail in November 2023, and still faces prosecution.

Evangelista offers the case of Efren Morillo, who survived a massacre by the police in Quezon City. He was playing pool outside a friend’s house, with four other men, when a group of officers approached. They ransacked the home and found no drugs, but beat and shot all the men anyway, claiming nanlaban. “Call the crime scene operatives,” one of the officers instructs. “Leave the evidence behind. Say they all fought back.” Morillo, the sole survivor, was prosecuted for assault but refused to take a plea deal. After five years in court, he was acquitted. “The discovery of those lies,” Evangelista writes, was “due only to a single irregularity in the daily circumstances of fatal police encounters under the administration of Rodrigo Duterte. That irregularity is named Efren Morillo.”

Not only in the Philippines, but in much of the world, drug use is treated as a moral defect or mental dysfunction. Some People Need Killing doesn’t quite explain how Duterte was able to twist this prejudice into a policy of mass murder. What social conditions made this possible? A bad economy? An increase in crime? Dissatisfaction with the politics that came before? Perhaps Evangelista decided that any explanation would be too conjectural. But as the award-winning Filipino podcast Tokhang sa Tokhang argues, Duterte was not the first politician to push a drug war in the Philippines. In the 1970s and 1980s, Marcos Sr. persecuted drug users alongside Communists; he oversaw the establishment of the Dangerous Drugs Board, a health agency with a tellingly judgmental name. In the 1990s, Vice President Joseph Estrada founded an abstinence initiative based on the Reagan-era Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, and Alfredo Lim, the mayor of Manila, mirrored Duterte’s Davao approach, killing dozens of suspected drug users and dealers. The persecution of opium users by the Catholic Church goes much further back, to the colonial period.

Evangelista notes that the use of illicit drugs in the Philippines is quite low, “roughly half the global average.”⁴ The Duterte administration exaggerated the crisis by inventing data and making unscientific claims. (In a recent book, The Ghost in the Addict, the psychologist Shepard Siegel cites Duterte as an extreme case of “appealing to the brain-disease model of addiction”—the idea that every drug user is an addict, and that every addict is beyond rationality.) Yet polls throughout Duterte’s term showed overwhelming support for the war on drugs. Researchers Gideon Lasco and Lee Edson Yarcia have observed that, because of a longstanding religious panic around drug use and limited investments in behavioral health and harm reduction, many Filipinos see forced treatment in prisonlike settings as the only alternative to violent punishment—a “paradigm that dichotomizes between killing and ‘rehab.’” (In my reporting on drug policy in the US, I’ve observed a similar, stubborn reliance on criminal penalties and mandatory treatment.)

Every war on drugs is principally a war on the poor, waged in alleyways and shacks. Evangelista describes the home life of Djastin Lopez, who was killed for having used marijuana and meth: twenty-eight members of his family “lived shoulder to sweaty shoulder in four boxes each roughly the size of a standard parking space.” She often had to refuse her sources’ requests for burial expenses. “Sometimes a grandmother would tell me there was no money for school. One woman would plead every so often for a loan—for food, for power bills, for rent, for funds to visit a son in jail.” Evangelista typed these harrowing stories while drinking cappuccinos and chain-smoking in her “apartment suburbia,” she writes with bleak self-awareness. “Had I not been a journalist, the practical impact of Rodrigo Duterte’s election on me would have been limited to my tobacco consumption and little else.”

Evangelista worked at Rappler between 2011 and 2018, a difficult period for Filipino journalists. (She left “halfway through the war,” to take a nonfiction fellowship in New York. “Rappler decided my presence in Manila was a security risk. I agreed.”) Some two dozen media workers were killed while Duterte was in power; the majority of these crimes occurred in urban areas and went unsolved. In December 2021, for example, gunmen murdered Jesus Malabanan, a freelance reporter and a contributor to Reuters’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the drug war, as he was watching television in his family’s store. The Duterte administration also engaged in widespread “red-tagging” (red-baiting), singling out journalists (and activists and professors, among others) as communists. Len Olea, the secretary-general of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, recently likened this experience to “having a target on your face.”

Duterte also went after entire media outlets. In 2020, during the worst months of the pandemic, his administration refused to renew the broadcast license of ABS-CBN, Evangelista’s first workplace, jeopardizing 11,000 media jobs and potentially cutting off a weekly audience of 70 million. (The company now has half the number of employees.) Rappler faced the retraction of its operating license and charges of tax evasion and “cyberlibel”; its reporters, most of whom were in their twenties, were banned from the presidential palace. The site was also denigrated as a propaganda arm of the CIA based on its receipt of foreign (namely, American) funding and its large Western readership. “We were threatened daily on social media,” Evangelista writes. “Because we were women, the threats included rape.” (Ressa, the editor-in-chief, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Last month an appeals court in the Philippines ruled that Rappler’s license should be restored.)

It was harder yet for the photographers. Evangelista mentions Eloisa, who “supplemented the five-dollar contributing freelancer rate with weekends shooting birthday parties,” and Vincent, who was often “the only journalist left following the morgue truck…. Once, when the call came on a Sunday night, he brought his toddler along, leaving her in the car with his wife just long enough to do his job.”

Just before Christmas 2020, an off-duty police officer in Manila shot and killed his neighbors: a mother, Sonya, and her grown son, Anton. The cop had become upset when Anton launched an improvised boga firecracker, and the two men got into a fight outside. Sonya intervened, as did the cop’s teenage daughter, who yelled, “My father is a policeman” (meaning, “Do you know who you’re dealing with?”), after which the cop pulled out his gun. It was all caught on video, and #MyFatherIsAPoliceman went viral. The double homicide caused many Filipinos to reevaluate the war on drugs.

For Evangelista, the murders registered with “no particularity.” She scoffed at a Twitter post that read, “This is not who we are.” Her anger wasn’t directed at the police alone. “I was furious instead at everyone who announced their indignation after ignoring a four-year parade of coffins.”

Near the end of the book, Evangelista stands on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue as cannons shoot confetti into the air. It’s February 2022, the anniversary of the Edsa Revolution, and Duterte, “whose government had allowed the burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Cemetery of Heroes with a twenty-one-gun salute,” has chosen not to come.

A few months later, on election day, Evangelista is back on the same avenue. Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter, have been elected president and vice-president. “The jubilant crowds have poured into the driveway of the Marcos-Duterte campaign headquarters,” Evangelista writes, “where the citizens of the revolution once marched to overthrow Ferdinand Marcos, Sr.” Duterte’s youngest son, meanwhile, is elected mayor of Davao.

Today, nearly two years into Marcos Jr.’s term, the killings have slowed down, but Duterte’s drug war is still official policy, still coming into view. In August a former high-ranking customs official accused close allies of Duterte, including his son and son-in-law, of direct involvement in importing more than a ton of shabu from Vietnam, valued at nearly $200 million, in 2018. (Duterte denies the allegations.) Marcos, meanwhile, has refused to cooperate with the International Criminal Court in a probe of crimes against humanity: “It’s not right for outsiders to tell us who to investigate,” he said at a press conference last fall.

Evangelista was recently on book tour in the Philippines.⁵ Northeast of Manila, in Quezon City—home to Love-Love, the girl who’d watched a vigilante shoot her parents, and Morillo, the stubborn pool player who wasn’t meant to survive—Evangelista met with survivors and family members at the Church of Our Lady of the Promised Land. They held candles and stood in a circle, under a big white banner that said “STOP THE KILLINGS.”

Despite their protests, despite the investigative reporting and testimonies and human rights reports, the killings did not stop. As journalists, we labor and wish for a different result: accountability, social change, the affliction of the powerful. When this doesn’t happen, what do we make of our work? Returning to the Rappler newsroom this past spring, Evangelista emphasized the keeping of evidence over transformation: “I hope to have honored the people who told the story. I hoped to have done it in a compelling fashion. And I believe in a record, I think that’s what I offer.” At the church meeting in Quezon City, a young woman named Marilyn Malimban, whose boyfriend was murdered on his knees by the police, addressed her fellow survivors—and perhaps us reporters, too. “Tell the story,” she said. “Tell it, again and again. Even if there is no justice now, there is justice above. There is justice somewhere else.”