Witnessing the Grim Realities of the Drug War

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler, Esquire, and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.

“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”

Show notes:

• Evangelista's Rappler archive
• Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (Random House • 2023)
• 01:00 The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2020)
• 11:00 Evangelista's Philippine Daily Inquirer archive
• 21:00 "The Rapture of Rodrigo Duterte" (Patricia Evangelista and Nicole Curato • Rappler • May 2016)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices