We watched a government kill people. Now it wants our trust

I was in 5th grade the first time I heard my classmates talk about a body count like it was the weather.

It was the early years of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, and the news in the Philippines was the same every night: police shootouts, grainy CCTV footage, men face-down on wet pavement with cardboard signs around their necks. The anchors called it the war on drugs. The police called it nanlaban — he fought back — every single time. My classmates called it scary. One of them said it quietly one morning, the way you say something you’ve heard your parents say at home: “Even kids got killed.” Nobody argued. Nobody was surprised.