Pinoy journo Patricia Evangelista's book on Duterte drug war among New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2023
Filipino journalist Patricia Evangelista’s debut book Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country made it to the New York Times’ 10 best books of the year.
In Some People Need Killing, Evangelista recalls how she covered the extrajudicial killings under former president Rodrigo Duterte from 2016 to 2022. She also details how the bloody war on drugs affected her well-being as a journalist and as a person.
In its citation, the Times noted how Evangelista and her colleagues “kept folders on their computers that were organized not by date but by hour of death.”
“Offering the intimate disclosures of memoir and the larger context of Philippine history, Evangelista also pays close attention to language, and not only because she is a writer,” the Times added. “Language can be used to communicate, to deny, to threaten, to cajole. It can propagate lies, but it also allows one to speak the truth.”
Some People Need Killing was also among the Times’ 100 notable books of 2023, which described its prose as “powerful” and “gripping.”
In becoming part of the Times' list, Patricia, in a Facebook post, said she’s “incredibly grateful” and “more than a little stunned.”
“I wrote more than 90,000 words. I can't quite find any for right now,” she said.
Evangelista's book is also part of TIME Magazine’s top 100 must-read books of 2023.
"She’s unflinching in bearing witness to the thousands of dead killed under Duterte’s reign of terror, which he claimed was largely focused on drug dealers and users, but wreaked havoc on almost every part of Filipino society," the magazine said.
In an interview with CNN Philippines, Evangelista said she wrote the book so that future generations will remember what happened during the Duterte administration.
"I want them to see the names and see the faces. Imagine the lives that were lost and imagine the lives that were lived,” she said.
The Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs or Oplan Tokhang saw the execution of thousands of suspected drug peddlers, users, and small-time criminals.
Based on the government's "Real Numbers" data, a total of 6,229 individuals were killed during anti-drug operations from July 1, 2016, to Jan. 31, 2022.
Rights groups, however, estimated that the number of deaths from the bloody anti-narcotics campaign reached as high as 27,000.