Some People Need Killing summary

Rodrigo Duterte told a simple and compelling story about what had gone wrong in the Philippines: Poverty. Crime. Corruption. All the problems plaguing ordinary Filipinos, he said, were caused by illegal drugs. It was the durugistas – a catch-all term for addicts, users, and pushers – who were to blame for everything from failing schools to dangerous neighborhoods.

Drugs, asserted Duterte, made people paranoid, heartless, and mindless. Addicts robbed, stole, and extorted to get their fix and raped and murdered when they were high. Duterte said there were 3 million – no, 4.5 million – drug-crazed Filipinos. If your neighbor’s kid is a junkie, he told his supporters, you should kill them – you’d be doing their parents a favor by putting that monster down. 

In the mouth of another politician, these words might have been little more than rabble-rousing rhetoric. But Duterte meant it. For many voters, this was the appeal. Since the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, Filipino politics had been dominated by respectable career politicians. Liberal reforms had been locked in and the economy had grown but the spoils were unevenly distributed. While the middle class prospered, impoverished Filipinos felt abandoned. 

Duterte, the self-styled man of the people, ridiculed the high-minded talk of wealthy liberals – they didn’t understand the world beyond their gated communities, he said. Human rights didn’t cut it in the crime-infested neighborhoods where most Filipinos lived. The only way to help ordinary citizens was to eliminate the scourge of illegal drugs. And the only language junkies and dealers understand is force. To Duterte, it was mercilessly simple: some people need killing. 

To hell with the bureaucrats and the bleeding hearts, Duterte said – they got us into this mess. He promised to fix it and replace rehabilitation with retribution. His plan was to kill all 4.5 million of the so-called drug-crazed citizens. Morticians, he claimed, would grow rich during his time in office. 

Distressingly, Duterte’s pledge to kill won him the presidency in 2016. Thousands of durugistas were gunned down by the police during his six-year term. Officially, these were violent desperados resisting arrest. In reality, most raids targeted small-time crooks and users and went down like executions rather than attempts to apprehend suspects. State-sanctioned vigilantes, meanwhile, added to the death toll: according to human rights organizations, by the end of his presidency in 2022, Duterte’s war on drugs had claimed up to 25,000 lives.