Rusty Reading

“There was dissent in the aftermath. There was an opposition. There were lawyers and priests and activists, but for those of us documenting Duterte’s war, the protests were no more than a whisper in a hurricane.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“President Duterte said kill the addicts, and the addicts died. He said kill the mayors, and the mayors died. He said kill the lawyers, and the lawyers died.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Is was easy to follow the parade of coffins and imagine these last two deaths as inevitabilities, the natural consequence of violent rhetoric from above and wholesale impunity below.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long. I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bag rans out. They are hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whispered about the children that desperation had forced them to abort.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country