Patricia Evangelista starts with a story. At every stop of her book tour, she delivers a monologue akin to a sermon to her spellbound audience. It is one she knows like the back of her hand: she has covered it since 2016, spent the last four years writing and revising it, and she is now touring it across the Philippines to a jam packed April schedule.
Unlike her last name, she isn’t the “bearer of good news” exactly, a running irony mentioned in her spiel. The story she tells is a tragedy—but more than that, it’s a reckoning. Her memoir Some People Need Killing, an account of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs that left thousands dead, is a story that needs telling.
Although Evangelista modestly claims she is no public speaker, her command of the crowd is a glimpse of her youth spent in that stint. After all, it was a college championship in a global speaking tournament that landed her a column in the nation’s most reputed broadsheet, thrusting her writing—and distinct flair— into the public eye. She is the closest thing to a rockstar journalist in the Philippines, where broadcast is king and the most recognizable media personalities are polished television anchors.
In her combat boots, white T-shirt and jeans, and a pottymouth that equips her to take her main subject, former president Rodrigo Duterte, to task. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she references in the book’s afterword, and then later, because we have to se.