In a speech, Patricia Evangelista once described “what terror looks like.”

For a trauma journalist like her, who covered then-president Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war intensively for three years, it meant standing outside a house where five men had been murdered, where families pleaded for the names of the dead, and to whom a police officer would laugh and say, “See, even God is on my side.”

It meant interviewing vigilantes who admitted how they were ordered by the police to kill. It meant attending a wake “empty of mourners” due to chilling fear, or witnessing how “one woman who had just buried a son stood outside a police station standing guard because another son had been arrested.”

At one point, the terror meant seeing young kids in Caloocan painting their street wall with a new name: “Patayan St.,” which literally translates to “Killing Street.”

In her book “Some People Need Killing” — a title quoting one of the hired gunmen she once sat down with — Evangelista recounts in sharp, harrowing detail these faces of terror and many other stories of brutality, which have not let up since Duterte took office and even after he stepped down.

Born in 1985, five months before the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship, Evangelista began her career at ABS-CBN News Channel and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, covering human rights stories such as the 2009 Maguindanao massacre and the forced disappearances of activists under the Arroyo regime, before becoming an investigative and trauma reporter for the independent news outlet Rappler. “People like me work in the uneasy space between what is and what should be,” says Evangelista of trauma reporting.

‘ ’52’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:2a1c5662-ec4c-413b-a25d-473543fc357d’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘”I wrote many stories in the aftermath of crime scenes, but as body followed body, I felt there was a bigger [story] I needed to understand,

“Some People Need Killing” has been out in Philippine bookstores, and the author is currently conducting a series of talks following the book’s launch.

But why exactly did Evangelista write the book?

“I think we’re all the sum of what we’ve seen and experienced,” she tells me via email. “What we saw in the six years of the Duterte administration was blood and fear and hate. I’ve been reckoning with the same realities that Filipinos lived all over the country, only in my case the reckoning meant setting the words on paper. It was a difficult process, but it would have been far more difficult to look away.”

She adds, “I didn’t set out to write a book when the slaughter began. I went out on the streets to cover what President Duterte called a war. I wrote many stories in the aftermath of crime scenes, but as body followed body, I felt there was a bigger [story] I needed to understand. It was no longer sufficient to ask who the dead were, and how they died, but why we let them die.”

‘ ’53’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:a4329b67-e5f1-492e-a708-e732960bb9dd’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Published by Penguin Random House, “Some People Need Killing” chronicles Evangelista’s encounters while reporting on Duterte’s nationwide

Covering the carnage

Published by Penguin Random House, “Some People Need Killing” chronicles Evangelista’s encounters while reporting on Duterte’s nationwide tokhang operations and the culture of impunity it has permitted. Tagging with fellow journalists assigned on the night shift, she surveys the horror, “story by story, crime scene by crime scene.” She speaks to victims and witnesses, gathers casualties by the hour of death, sits across hired killers, and probes state authorities — most of which would end up in the news reports and the seven-part investigative series, “Murder in Manila,” that she produced at the peak of the carnage. “There were corpses every night at the height of the killings. Seven, 12, 26, the brutality reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each. The language failed as the body count rose,” she writes. These drug war stories would later reap recognition from the Human Rights Press Awards and the Society of Publishers in Asia Awards in 2017 and the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia in 2018, among others.

The book, subtitled “A Memoir of Murder in My Country,” is sectioned into three parts: “Memory,” “Carnage,” and “Requiem,” underscoring respectively Duterte’s origins and emergence to power, his promised drug war, and its murderous legacy. In this sense, Evangelista’s reportage, now more expansive and personal than her original work for Rappler, also becomes sort of an explainer about the state of human rights and political affairs in the Philippines.

And if Raffy Lerma’s “Pieta” stands as the most chilling visual account of Duterte’s reign of terror, then Evangelista’s book might just be its worthy textual counterpart, for how the author pieces the stories together with such masterful dexterity. She appeals to our emotions but never loses sight of the bigger picture, of recording a truthful account of a brutal period in our country that she hopes someday would count for something.

“I want them to remember what happened,” Evangelista tells Rico Hizon on CNN Philippines. “I want them to see the names and see the faces. Imagine the lives that were lost and imagine the lives that were lived. I wrote the book not because I thought I would change policy. I wanted to make sure a record existed for whatever future generations might need as a reckoning. And I hope to honor the families who trusted me with their stories.”

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