The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

When Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines and won, in 2016, the Western press noted the similarities between this unconventional candidate and Donald Trump—who also liked to casually espouse violence on the campaign trail and beyond.  Duterte used provocative and obscene language to tap into the country’s fears about a real, albeit overstated, drug problem. “Every drug addict was a schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father,” as reporter Patricia Evangelista puts it, “and if he can’t find a child to rape, he’ll rape a goat.” But, unlike Donald Trump, Duterte made good on his promise of death. More than twenty thousand extrajudicial killings took place over the course of his six-year term in office, according to human-rights groups—and Duterte remained quite popular as bodies piled up in the streets. Reporting for the news site Rappler, Evangelista confronted the collateral damage when Durterte started to enact his “kill them all” policies. “I had to take accountability,” she tells David Remnick. Her book, “Some People Need Killing,” is published in the U.S. this week, and Evangelista has left the Philippines because of the danger it puts her in. “I own the guilt,” Evangelista says. “How can I sit in New York, when the people whose stories I told, who took the risk to tell me their stories, are sitting in shanties across the country and might be at risk because of things they told me.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. These are very hard times for democracy and for democracies all over the world. If you look around the globe, you'll find plenty of evidence for that. But of the many authoritarian rulers who rose to power in recent years, perhaps none embraced violence as gleefully as Rodrigo Duterte of the Philadelphia. Like Donald Trump, Duterte liked to joke about hurting people. Except he wasn't really joking.

Duterte said he would execute criminals without an arrest or a trial. And if someone was suspected of being a drug dealer or even a drug user, he would have them executed right on the street. The first such killings happened within a day of his inauguration. Officially, the Philippines says that about 6,000 people were killed under Duterte's regime. but the number is almost certainly higher. Maybe most horrifying of all, this was done by a leader

who won an election in 2016 on the promise of murder. To believe in Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe he was a killer, or that he was joking when he said he was a killer. You had to believe in the specter of a narco state, or you had to believe he was only playing to the crowd.

You had to believe drug addiction is criminal, that drug addicts are not human, and that their massacre can be considered acceptable public policy. Patricia Evangelista documented the violence for the news site Rappler in the Philippines. You had to believe the intended dead would be drug lords and rapists only. Drug lords and rapists, and not your cousins who go off into Laguas and Marsh to pick up their baggies of meth. You had to believe there would be a warning before the gunshot ring out. To believe in Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe he was just. You had to believe he was

honest. You had to believe he was untainted by the oligarchy and beholden to no one. You had to believe he was your father. You had to believe he was your savior. You had to believe he loved you, because you love him enough to carry his name. Evangelista was based until recently in Manila, and she's just published the remarkable book, Some People Need Killing, which to my mind is an astonishing chronicle of a reign of terror, and it's put Evangelista herself in enormous danger. Let's start with you.

You were a staff writer at a newspaper in the Philippines that has a reputation for, I would say, intense independence and rare independence. Tell me how your career started. Well, I've been a trauma journalist for more than a decade. It means I go to places where people die. So I pack my bags, I interview the survivors, I file my stories, and then I go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don't wait very long.

And for most of the time, I spent as an investigative reporter for Rappler, I did the same for them. And in 2016, a man named Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines. And he ran on a platform of death, and that's not an exaggeration. He promised that the fish would feed fat on the corpses of criminals. He said morticians would grow rich with a deluge of dead. He said that if your neighbor's child is an addict, kill them yourselves. it would be a kindness to their parents. Duterte won.

What was the context in which he was running for office in 2016? There's not a country I can think of without a drug addiction problem, without a drug trafficking problem to go along with it. What was he running against and why? Well, when he ran, things were generally stable, so to speak. but what was necessary was to create a specter that he could run against. The Philippines has a drug problem, as most countries do,

but comparative studies will demonstrate that we have less than half, the global average. But that wasn't the picture Duterte painted. What he painted was a picture of drug dealers leaving the country in shambles, that every drug addict was schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father, and if you can't find a child to rape, he'll rape a goat. And he said, if you don't believe him, if you don't believe how terrible they are,

he will give you the drugs himself, feed it to your children, and watch them become monsters. Now, he was elected in 2016. Yes. Not a good year for democracy. Not quite. How would you compare Duterte to Donald Trump, or would you? Well, certainly they make promises,

but there are charismatic men all over the world who will make promises, who will say outrageous things, and people will laugh, and they will draw crowds, and sometimes it's funny. Then they say more terrible things, kill the drug addicts. It could never be a crime to say that I will kill you if you destroy my country. It's a very legitimate statement.

And people will find maybe that's a little acceptable because they make my life terrible. And then later they'll say kill the activists and then kill the journalist and kill whoever it is. So are they similar men? Certainly in that they like the outrageous and they like the applause and certainly they know how to entertain a crowd. Perhaps one of the differences is that Duterte keeps his promise. Not all of them, he didn't end drugs in the Philippines or criminality or corruption, but he said kill them all and people died. Kill them all, he said, this is a quote, kill them all, and it resounds through your book,

like a ghostly chorus. You used the phrase drug pusher in the book, but this also includes a number of people including drug users. Yes. In Filipino, Duterte calls them Drogistas, meaning drug dealers, drug users, junkies, anything. Essentially, he calls them when you're into drugs. So it can be any sort of association. Sometimes he even refers to people who wants to protect individuals who are castigated for using drugs. I'm talking with Patricia Evangelista about her book, Some People Need Killing.

Now, tell me about Rappler, the publication you have. were writing for. Maria Ressa is the famous editor of it, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize. It's been on this show, did extraordinary work. Tell me about how you started working on the Duterte regime's brutality, what your day-to-day life was like and what kind of danger you were in day-to-day. What was good about working for Rappler was that there was no editor who said, step back, it's dangerous. Maria was something like a lightning rod. When the government was angry, they directed the anger at her.

Those of us on the field had the freedom to cover what we needed to cover. We were small staffed. We had very few resources. We had two cars. Two cars? Two cars. How many people on the staff? For reporters, less than 20.

Tiny. Tiny. And to your question, why I started or how I started covering the drug war, a lot of us saw it coming. Early on, I was doing analysis for Rappler, looking at the narratives that the presidential candidates were using to sell themselves. And there was a story, the final story I wrote before the election. It was called the rapture of Rodrigo Duterte. And I thought I went terribly purple on that piece. Like the final story. The final line was, the streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte is elected. And I regretted that line because I thought it was too dramatic. And then I was standing by the side of a road and there was a body on the ground and I stepped over the gutter and the blood ran red over my boots.

And then I understood. The only way I could survive that on a daily basis was that at the height of the drug war when there were corpses every night was to... On the streets of vanilla. streets of Manila and then the night shift at night, a group of very talented photographers and writers from everywhere, we would go body to body, crime scene to crime scene. And at the height of the killings, when there were so many, I would ask the same questions every night. Was it a body dump? Was it a salvaging? Was it a by bus? Was it a drive-by? Was the killer? Police reporting. Essentially, was the killer a cop or a vigilante? Were the hands bound?

Was the head wrapped in tape? Was the body stuffed in a bag? Was there a gun on the ground? That sort of thing. And then you learn to develop a better checklist so you don't miss anything. And then, and this is the new thing, you learn to stand still and listen for the screaming. That's when you find out who the family is. And then you go up to them, you apologize, you condole, you keep your voice low, you ask simple questions, what was it? name, when did you last see him, how did you know he was gone? Mostly what I asked was tell me a story, tell me your story, and then tell me what happened next. And the methodology was important to me because it kept me on the scene in my mind. And I would test it every time.

If I could close my eyes and see the room or the highway or the alley in 360 degrees, know where the bullet came in, how the light pitched through the window, if there was a window, know that the bikini briefs were red and white polka dots. Then it meant I could go home and I could live it in my head, so I could tell the story again. What's the effect on you to do this night after night after night? I knew this question was coming. I still don't have an answer. Usually, the question people ask is how do you survive it? And I have a pretty good answer for that.

It's caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. But that's the throwaway line. Yeah, that's the glib version. That's the glib version. The not so glib version is that it is very hard to keep my universe in place in that I appear to be a functioning member of society in that when I was filing stories, I was delivering the word count, and I could lie perfectly well when I couldn't. But you pay for it. You pay for what you do. And I think the best explanation was something, some work corresponded sent before that you're not a camera in that you take all of this. sin. I take all of the sin. And I live with it every day. Every story, every interview I never

published lives in my head. They play back at three in the morning. And then every phone call from an unknown number, I think someone's going to tell me someone's dead. And it's because of something I wrote. And you can't explain why the nightmares play out the way they're do. And you can't explain why sometimes you just sit there and then your brain goes in a loop and the loop doesn't stop. So to get that book out, I'm hoping the loop may stop a little bit. You think the writing of it may in some way end your nightly nightmares and purge them? No. I made a mistake. I thought if I took a break from the night reporting and rolling, a book maybe that was a safer place for my head.

Where it may have just clarified the stories. It clarifies the stories and maybe it was good because I didn't intend to write this book in first person. This was meant to be a reportorial book, third person. Here are the dead. Here is what happened. Here is who's responsible. But I understood through the process I had to take accountability that all this whole

dramatic, I am an objective reporter. I write in the third person. That's not a moral high ground. That's a failure of nerve. Because I can tell you the worst of all of this. It's that I go to cover a story and there's your blood on the ground and there's all of that. And I'm used to that. It's the aftermath of going to Starbucks and getting.

a cappuccino because I can go to Starbucks and get a cappuccino and I know two blocks down some family can't even afford the coffin to bury the kid but you have to divide your brain because if you help one family it means you bought the story and there I feel like I'm making moral judgments every step of the way and if I stray out of the way just one bit I won't I won't have control. And this is why I'm terribly inarticulate about all of this. I try not to think about it. And I hang on by my fingertips.

Pat, you wrote these stories again and again and again, as did your colleagues. And yet the drug war, to use Duterte's phrase for it, this kind of murderous, extra-legal, ongoing assault was popular. Yes. Describe the popularity of it and why. What Rodrigo Duterte did was he told a story. And he started with language. And I know we spoke of this earlier in that I promise not to deploy profanity during your interview.

And I find it very odd to sit in a polite setting, expected to be polite, speaking about the man who decided to break language. So you can go to hell. Mr. Obama, you can go to hell. You better choose purgatory. A large part of the fact-checking of the book is to discover the nuances

of when he said putang in Filipino, did he mean motherfucker or son of a bitch? So he liked... This was on national broadcast. This is a national broadcast. And generally, regardless of which culture you're from, a public figure, a politician, a head of state, is not expected to deploy profanity in public speeches. And he said, fuck that. So he said Barack Obama was a son of a bitch.

He said the pope was a son of a bitch. Many people, many institutions were sons of bitches, the European Union, the United States, journalists, the United Nations, activists, drug dealers, everyone. And he, like Donald Trump, discovered that had enormous connective appeal. Precisely. And he said many things that other presidents never said before. He said he would kill 100,000 criminals when he's elected. He said he wanted to rape an Australian missionary, except he couldn't because he was dead by the time he showed up. He said, I believe he wanted to be the first one there. Yes. He said journalists are legitimate targets of assassination.

He said he killed cops, he killed kidnappers, he killed... He himself. He himself. He personally used that language. And then he would say, sometimes I only killed three, or 300, or a thousand. It doesn't matter. Because listen to the language, I killed, I shot, I saved, I ordered, I. I, Rodrigo Duterte.

So it's that sort of mythology that exploded. Rodrigo Duterte, the one who will save us all. Okay, so what did you learn about your fellow Philippine citizens? What did you learn about your own country that you didn't know before? We ask ourselves this where Donald Trump was concerned. It wasn't that Donald Trump came in and it was a conservative beating a liberal. No. It was something else.

And we learned things about the state of the country, the division of the country, what people feel, what they're reacting to, and not all of it's pretty. Mm-hmm. I learned that in as much as Duterte made himself the every man. It meant every man could be Duterte if they wanted. Duterte may have provided the language. He provided the vernacular. He provided the narrative.

But we wanted it, too. We decided some people didn't deserve to live. What effect has this had on the country as a whole? You write these stories, and what effect did this have on the populace? I hesitate to use the word trauma, because I'm told this is a word that is overused in general. But we're a traumatized nation. And the trouble is, in the aftermath, after six years of Duterte, we elected the son of another dictator. And we elected Duterte's daughter.

So it's the dictator's son with a punisher's daughter. Bongbong. Bong, Bong, Marcus. And there's no. accountability there. There's no reckoning. So if you don't know there are wounds, you can't fix things. So there are many children and many generations of people who will continue to believe that some people, because of some failure of virtue or some sickness or some whatever any politicians say, some people do not deserve to live. Now, how long have you, how long has it

been since you left Philippines? Give or take a few months. I it was recommended that it was in my best interests. What does that mean? It means we don't know the risk of having released this book. And do you think you'll go back? Yes, absolutely. When I'll go back, it's not certain, but I have to go back in that it's not a moral patriotism or anything. That's my home.

and the story is ongoing. It's not over. People are still dying on the streets. Journalists have been shot in Manila. And there are many other stories that have to be told about my country. I am a field reporter. That's where I belong. And I'm also formerly Catholic.

I own the guilt. How can I sit in New York when the people whose stories I told, who took their risk to tell me their stories? are sitting in shanties across the country and might be at risk because of things they told me. In the book you describe yourself as a citizen of a nation, I cannot recognize as my own. Do you still feel that way?

Yes, but in a more nuanced fashion, in that I am Filipino. I take accountability for the choices we made. We voted for Duterte. I may not have, but that's under my watch as well. but I refuse to believe this is the only possibility for my country. I don't think this is the only future possible for us. Do I believe that journalism is the way forward?

I don't know. Because I have learned after many years to negotiate my expectations as a journalist. If I believed my story saved lives or changed things, I would have stopped working. I wouldn't have been able to get up in the morning. Now all I believe is my job is to keep a record. And that's it. And if someday that record is necessary, then it's out there. You don't think your stories change anything?

No. No. Maybe I don't know. I hope, if nothing else, because if journalism doesn't save the world and it doesn't, we both know that. But I would like to have, honored the people who risk their lives to tell their stories.

They didn't have to talk to me, and they did. They are living examples of what happens when autocrats and dictators rise, and we let them. Patricia Evangelista, thank you so much. Thank you. Patricia Evangelista's new book is called Some People Need Killing. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deccan. And a special thanks this week to Alana Casanova Burgess. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.