Non-fiction corner: A country where ‘some people need killing’ was State policy

By JENNIFER SZALAI

NEW YORK: Before reading “Some People Need Killing,” a powerful new book by the Philippine journalist Patricia Evangelista, I had assumed that the definition of “salvage” was straightforward. The word comes from salvare, Latin for “to save.” You salvage cargo from a wreckage; you salvage mementos from a fire.

But the word “salvage” has another meaning in Philippine English. This definition derives from salvaje, Spanish for “wild.” The Oxford English Dictionary calls it a “complete semantic change from the original English meaning ‘to rescue.’” It is a contronym: a word that can also mean its opposite. “To salvage” in the Philippines means “to apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial.”

Evangelista calls this a corruption of the language — one that turns out to be horrifically apropos. “Some People Need Killing” mostly covers the years between 2016 and 2022, when Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines and pursued a murderous campaign of “salvagings,” or extrajudicial killings — EJKs for short. Such killings became so frequent that journalists like Evangelista, then a reporter for the independent news site Rappler, kept folders on their computers that were organized not by date but by hour of death.

The book gets its title from one of Evangelista’s sources, a Duterte-supporting vigilante called Simon. “I’m not really a bad guy,” Simon told her, explaining that he was making the slum where he lived safer for his children. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.” They don’t just deserve it; they require it. Responsibility for the deaths rests with the dead themselves. “The language does not allow for accountability,” Evangelista writes. “The execution of their deaths becomes a performance of duty.”

The book is divided into three parts: “Memory,” “Carnage” and “Requiem.” “Carnage” describes how Duterte made good on his promises that Filipinos would die. The Philippine National Police put the number of casualties at about 8,000; Evangelista says that the real total is likely much higher, though even the highest estimate, of more than 30,000 dead, fails to capture the brutality of Duterte’s war.

She recounts a few killings in heart-rending detail. One victim was a young man with epilepsy. He was shot, then slapped, then shot again. A 52-year-old mother and her 25-year-old son were killed by their policeman neighbour over an improvised firecracker on their own lawn.

Evangelista saw the 11-second video clip filmed by a 16-year-old relative of the victims. Until then, she had been piecing together murder scenes from a hodgepodge of police reports, testimonies from frightened witnesses, and grainy CCTV footage.

“There should have been an explosion, a mushroom cloud, something, somewhere, signaling the sudden turn from life to death,” she writes, surprised at how the “tinny smack” of the gunshots sounded so quick and banal.

For years, she had been writing about death, and she is startled to realize a chilling truth: “It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.”