Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I don't know if people in the states realize how

casually people talked about the extrajudicial killings going on in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte.

Like, I'm Indonesian, and even I had family members who were like, eh, it is what it is. If you're not a drug dealer, you're not in danger, you know, while just chowing down breakfast on a Tuesday. And how we talk about things matters. The language we use, the words we pick. That's the thesis of Patricia Evangelista's book, Some People Need Killing. She was a journalist in Manila during this stretch of time, and producer

Mallory Yu over at All Things Considered, but together this piece featuring Evangalista

telling her story. After the break, NPR's Juana Summer sets it up, then Patricia Vanhalista takes it

from there. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind

closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories

of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and

methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

When Rodrigo Duterte was elected as president of the Philippines in 2016,

Patricia Evangelista was a field correspondent for Rappler, an independent news agency based in Manila.

Hours after Duterte's inauguration, the body of a man was found with a sign

declaring him a drug lord. So began years of reporting on the thousands of people who died as a

result of Duterte's war on drugs and the thousands more who were left behind. Those years of

reporting are the subject of Evanhalista's new book. It's called

Some People Need Killing, A Memoir of Murder in My Country. And as the title of the book suggests,

there will be frank discussion of extrajudicial killings that some may find disturbing.

The story that Rodrigo Duterte told when he ran for the presidency

was that the reason for the shambles the country was in was a drug scourge.

And then he said that addicts were terrible people.

Kill them all, he said.

...