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Reporters should continue to tell stories of the victims of the drug war even though the administration has changed, an author said at her book tour on Tuesday.

Patricia Evangelista, author of Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Own Country, shared tales of families she interviewed who were affected by the former Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial war on drugs.

At the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, she recalled how for six years, she documented killings that were executed by police and vigilantes for the drug war.

Asked how journalists can continue her coverage of drug war victims during the Marcos administration, she responded: “What can we do? If there are 700 (drug war victims), then you have 700 stories. Investigate them one by one. It’s really shoe-leather reporting. Knock on doors and interview the families.”

“It doesn’t change even if there’s a new president. Those stories are just as valid whether they happen now or they happened then. The risks might be different depending on individual stories and individual people. But the responsibility is still the same. And whatever the international background…there is always someone who dies. While people continue to die, and while there are still stories, we shouldn’t stop,” she added.

Evangelista said since the Philippines as a country does not know how to process its collective past trauma and tends to forget, journalists are needed more than ever?so people can remember catastrophic things that happened in the past.

“We need people to tell stories. And today, as it was in the drug war, as it was across the last forever, there are more stories and there are people who tell them, And we need journalists to tell those stories that are compellingly built on honesty,” Evangelista said.

“A journalist’s role, I think is to tell that story. Is to keep a record in the hope that at some point, the record matters. But even if it doesn't, for as long as there is a record that we don't deny it happened at all,” she said.

For Evangelista, the print form is not dying but changing to adapt to the digital age.

“I went very old school. I wrote a book so that is one of the oldest genres. I hear a lot of things about how storytelling is dead. Long-form is dead, narrative is dead. I don't think so…But I think the medium changes as we go along. Before, we were reading print. But after that, the print went online…The genre changes as we go along because the medium changes. When hundreds of years ago, people were sitting around campfires telling stories,” she said.

“That's what doesn’t die, the storytelling,” she added.

Some People Need Killing, Evangelista’s debut non-fiction book, was released by Random House in October 2023.

It has earned several awards including being Time Magazine's Number 1 non-fiction book of the year in 2023, the New York Times Top 10 best books of the year, and it was also a finalist of the New York Public Library’s Helen Berstein Book Award. Jaspearl Tan/DMS