Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country
Patricia Evangelista
Random House: 2023
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Remaindered Life
Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Duke University Press: 2022
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When Benigno Aquino III campaigned in 2010 as the reluctant heir of his parents’ politics, he promised a government that would follow a “daang matuwid (straight path)”. The son of Corazon Aquino, the first post-martial law president, and Benigno Aquino Jr, a former opposition senator assassinated by the military in 1983, Benigno Aquino   won through what sociologist Wataru Kusaka has called the “civic moral discourses” inherited from democratisation in the 1980s.

So committed was he to playing it “straight” at the expense of everything else that Aquino seemed to get self-righteous even when compassion was needed. After Typhoon Haiyan devastated the country in 2013, killing over 5,900 in the Eastern Visayas administrative region alone, Tacloban locals informed the president of looting and violent crime, with one testifying that he’d been shot at. “You’re alive, so you weren’t slaughtered,” was Aquino’s reply. He went on to admonish the man for “causing undue alarm” by making such claims.

• Tags: Issue 38, Neferti X.M. Tadiar, Patricia Evangelista, Philippines, William Arighi