Patricia Evangelista

They were drug-related deaths. They were illegal killings. They were targeted assassinations, salvagings, body dumps, drive-by shootings. They were “casualties in the Duterte administration’s war on crime,” or, as the news network ABS-CBN would put it, “
those who perished.” Even Philippine officials seemed unable to agree on the terminology. One senator called them “
summary killings.” The interior secretary called them “
alleged vigilante-style killings of drug personalities.”

he volume of Duterte’s dead was at times overwhelming, as was covering the powerful in a country where the powerful refuse to be held to account.

For someone with my sort of obsessive imagination, the practical caution required of a drug war reporter morphed into an almost paralyzing paranoia. Nothing was certain. Everyone was lying. The man with the selfie stick was a spy for the cops, or a killer, or a fanatical supporter of the president likely to upload my photo of meeting a source on to Twitter.

it happened, the longer I was a journalist, the better it suited me to disappear behind the professional voice of an omniscient third person, belonging everywhere and nowhere, asking questions and answering none. Every conclusion I published was double-sourced, fact-checked, and hyperlinked. My name might have been below

headlines, but the stories I wrote belonged to other people in other places, families whose grief and pain were so massive that mine was irrelevant.

as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own

The thousands who died were killed with the permission of my people. I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine

He said it at least
1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency, in a variety of contexts and against a range of enemies. He said it to four-year-old Boy Scouts

I know only a few dozen of the dead by name. It doesn’t matter to the president. He has enough names for them all. They are addicts, pushers, users, dealers, monsters, madmen.

Love-Love can name two of them. They are Dee and Ma.

fact that I’m a Filipino living in the Philippines means that for me, there’s no going home from the field. There is no seven-day shooting schedule with a pre-booked flight and an option to extend; only more corpses, every day.