In the Philippines between 2016 and 2022, journalist Patricia Evangelista reported for Rappler as President Duterte's drug war unleashed extrajudicial killings. Moving among grieving families, police, and the vigilantes who carried out the violence, she builds a firsthand reckoning with fear, complicity, and a country's silence.
When people say someone 'needs killing,' the verb is 'needing,' not 'killing': the victim's supposed need becomes the subject and the person pulling the trigger vanishes from the sentence. Language built this way leaves no room for accountability, and an execution gets recast as the performance of a duty.
Mass killing becomes bearable when the dead are said to have chosen their fate. In this story, drug users earned their dying and traded away their right to live by their own acts. Once the story takes hold, neighbors who lived beside them for years find they were never living beside people at all.
Killing had always happened. What changed was that the man at the top made it a matter of national pride, decided who deserved to live, and was cheered all the way down the line. Within hours of a president promising to kill drug users, a young man lay dead a short walk from where he had spoken.
Strongmen rise because the public lets them. Crowds cheered threats and profanity at rallies, sure that someone else would be the target. Some of the very voters who backed the war on drugs ended up among its dead.
Violence on this scale needs a story that citizens accept without challenge, and that acceptance asks for a quiet psychological accommodation from each of them. Refusing to question the words and stories handed down from power is what lets the killing go on.