An Interview with Patricia Evangelista | Teka Teka News

·48 min·4 clips

Patricia Evangelista spent six years documenting Duterte's drug war, leading to her book 'Some People Need Killing'.

The frame begins with fear. Robby Alampay introduces Patricia Evangelista through her years covering Duterte's drug war, including the repeated returns to victims' families, policemen, and hired killers. The timing is not dressed up as ceremony. Evangelista says the book's release near All Souls' Day was coincidence. For work built around death and memory, there may be no clean moment to put it out. The conversation gets practical quickly. Evangelista explains that the publishing timeline began with a 2019 contract, with the midterm elections needing to be finished first. Then Alampay asks about working alone, and the answer is blunt: she had protocols. She went with photographers, filmmakers, researchers, or a driver who knew what they were walking into. Consent matters here. Anyone close to the reporting also carries some of the danger. From there, the interview sits with the harder part: what journalism allows, what it refuses, and what stays with the reporter afterward. Alampay brings up the message about a child at a police station, and the question feels less like why she stepped in than how anyone could stand there and not act. The hidden cell makes that pressure impossible to soften. More than a dozen people were kept behind a bookshelf for days, with no toilet and no window. Evangelista does not perform cool distance. She sounds like someone still inside the cost of the work. Therapy may matter later, she says, but during the making and release of the book, survival came first. Alampay closes with where to find Some People Need Killing and the Tokhang sa Tokhang links, keeping the focus on the reporting.

As heard by us

A measured interview on the ethics, danger, and aftermath of reporting Duterte's war on drugs.

Patricia Evangelista's interview turns the making of Some People Need Killing into a sober account of what long reporting can do to a writer and to the rules she relies on.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a serious conversation about Duterte's drug war, the book it became, and the reporter still living with the work.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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