Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista:A Memoir of Murder in My Country

By GP SUMMARY

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Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista:A Memoir of Murder in My Country
 
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Patricia Evangelista's "journalistic masterpiece" is a detailed account of the Philippines' state-sanctioned killings of its citizens. The book, which was published by The New Yorker, is a deeply humane chronicle of the country's drug war. Evangelista, who came of age after a street revolution, documented the killings carried out by police and vigilantes under President Rodrigo Duterte's regime. The book captures the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides to prioritize certain lives over others. It also delves into the grammar of violence and human impulses to dominate and resist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Oct 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755458265

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Page title

Summary of Some People Need Killing

A

Summary of

Patricia Evangelista’s Book

A Memoir of Murder in My Country

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

All rights reserved.

Author: GP SUMMARY

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Cover, illustration: GP SUMMARY

Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY

Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country designed to enrich your reading experience.

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The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

Prologue

For over seven months, the Philippine Daily Inquirer maintained a Kill List, a public record of the dead, fed by reports from correspondents across the country. The circumstances of death were brief, with entries numbered and chronological. The victims were suspected drug pushers, suspected drug dealers, at large on drug charges, and on the local drug list. The methods were limited only by the killers' imaginations, with the daily death toll sometimes rising to double digits.

These deaths were drug-related, illegal, targeted assassinations, salvagings, body dumps, and drive-by shootings. The term extrajudicial killings became commonplace on the street and on television, leading to a Senate resolution calling for sessions investigating the recent rampant extrajudicial killings and summary executions of criminals. The press used the term as a qualifier, victims' families used it as a verb, and critics used it as an accusation.

The 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.

The author ran away halfway through the Philippine drug war, investigating a series of killings in the capital. They were a reporter who had learned to qualify statements and burn transcripts, and had paranoia about the possibility of criminal libel. They were unsure of the truth about the killings and were constantly searching for gaps in their stories.

After crossing the Pacific in October 2018, the author signed a three-month residency at a wooded estate in upstate New York. The residency required them to produce a book proposal, which they did, detailing their identity, origin, and experience of standing over a corpse at two in the morning. The author signed with a publisher at the end of the residency, committing to a first-person account of the Philippine drug war.

The first draft was a detailed 73,000-word reportage, describing the circumstances of every death and the crime scenes. The author's inability to hold themselves to account was due to a misguided commitment to objectivity and a failure of nerve. The book is a personal story, written in the author's own voice, as a citizen of a nation they cannot recognize as their own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of their people, and the author refuses to offer their own.

I

MEMORY

POSITIVE

Lady Love, an eleven-year-old girl from Manila, lives in the slums of Manila with her grandmother and mother. She is known by the name Love-Love, which she uses only for school papers. Her father, Dee, calls her Love, but she is not called Lady. Love-Love worries about her family's health and the rumors of her father using drugs.

Ma and Dee are fine, and they have surrendered to the new government and promised to never touch drugs again. Love-Love asks her father to move away, but Ma insists they need to save up first. One night, a bullet slammed into her head.

A reporter named Pat, born in 1985, goes to places where people die, packing bags, talking to survivors, and writing stories. She has collected a new handful of words since the election of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, such as kill and punish, which she uses to describe the victims.

The president uses the word kill at least 1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency, promising to kill people who get in the way of their future, overseas workers, mayors accused of drug dealing, human rights activists, and police. He also threatens to kill human rights activists if the drug problem worsens.

Love-Love knows only a few dozen of the dead by name, but the president has enough names for them all. They are addicts, pushers, users, dealers, monsters, and madmen.

In 1945, reporter Wilfred Burchett covered the story of a nuclear warhead exploding over Hiroshima for the London Daily Express. He covered the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. Love-Love, a Filipino reporter, spent the last decade flying into bombed-out cities, counting body bags, and reporting on the disasters that continue to plague her own country.

The author, a Filipino living in the Philippines, has spent the last six years documenting the killings committed under the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte. The brutality reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each, and there are no synonyms for blood or bleed. The blood doesn't gush by the time I walk into a crime scene, it sits in pools under doorways or streams out of the mouth in rivulets.

Dead is a good word for a journalist in the age of Duterte. Dead doesn't negotiate, requires little verification, and has bones, skin, and flesh. It can be touched, seen, photographed, and blurred for broadcast. When they left, the hole inside Ma's head was found, and Dee lay where he fell.

In conclusion, the story of Love-Love and the killings committed under Duterte's