Task Force Detainees of the Philippines

Nathan Ela[1]

I encountered the first cases of salvaging even before lunch on my first day as a volunteer at Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP). And I must admit, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. At base, of course, the photos that I saw in the Museum of Courage and Resistance, which portrayed corpses of activists scattered along a road, were simple enough to understand. They hit me in the gut: anger, disgust, sadness.

But it was the captions, the labels that confused me. “Salvagings?” I asked. Like most non-Filipinos, I’d never heard of a human rights violation called salvaging.

“Yes,” Carlo explained, “that’s how many people here talk about summary execution and extrajudicial killings, especially those during martial law.”