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.