This is not a Tagalog word.
It’s an acronym for the English phrase “extra-judicial killings.”
EJK refers to criminal suspects being killed without having received due process under the law. That means no trial.
It is ejecución extrajudicial in Spanish.
The practice was reportedly prevalent during the era of President Ferdinand Marcos.
A cited example from more recently is the Maguindanao massacre, which happened in 2009.
For decades, the preferred Filipino term for such killings was the Spanish- and English-influenced coined word “salvage.”
Sinalvage sila.
They were “massacred.”
They were “bumped off.”
That term “salvage” originated from the practice of having to “salvage” a corpse from a river in which the dead body was dumped.
The term EJK came into widespread use in the year 2016, after political opponents of Rodrigo Duterte wantonly accused him of encouraging the practice before and after his election as the country’s president.
Below is a video of our president showing how fed up he was with warnings from columnists and other members of the media that he will have to answer to other world leaders for the so-called EJKs.
