02/12/2025
Although doctors work tirelessly to save lives, our country still struggles with rising violence. There is still so much to be done to bring lasting peace and safety. May justice be served for you and your family, Doc. May your soul rest in peace. 🙏🏼
MEMORIAL FOR DR. AVELEX SALINAS AMOR
With the CIM Nexus 2.0 Class of 2000
This image does not leave you.
A quiet stretch of highway in Guihulngan. Morning light that should have been ordinary. A doctor stepping out of his car to breathe, stretch his legs, maybe shake off the exhaustion of another night spent caring for people who could not pay him back. A man in a white coat in a country that does not always know how to keep its healers alive.
Then the motorcycles.
Then the shots.
Then the silence.
It is a silence that has not lifted in the years since. It clings to us still, like the smell of earth after rain, like the memory of something sacred disturbed. We meet here today, the Nexus Class of 2000, not simply to remember a friend but to carry the weight of a story this country has not yet had the courage to finish.
Dr. Avelex Salinas Amor was 43.
But age means nothing when a life is lived so fiercely that it outlives the body that carried it.
When news broke on November 20, 2018, many of us felt a physical grief, the kind that caves the chest inward. A physician shot dead at the side of the road, trailed by men whose names we still do not know, serving a community that loved him but could not protect him. We felt our throats close, our tears spill before we could stop them. Because this was not merely the death of a colleague. It was the murder of the idea that service and integrity would be enough to shield a good man from danger.
In the hospital he led, the Canlaon District Hospital, three-fourths of the staff wore black ribbons, and grief moved across the wards like a slow river. They pinned those ribbons not as accessories but as wounds, as confessions of helplessness, as last-ditch tributes to the man who refused to tamper a daily time record, refused to let income leak through corruption, refused to let patients go untreated simply because they were poor. They wore those ribbons because in the short time he stood at the helm, Dr. Avelex asked for honesty in a system where honesty had become an inconvenience. And people noticed. They noticed enough to be grateful. Others noticed enough to be threatened.
Avelex knew.
He knew the assignment was dreaded.
Four chiefs before him were replaced like lightbulbs, disagree with one politically-connected employee, and your days were numbered. But still he went. Still he stayed. Still he said, “If I get killed, just make sure you get justice for me." He said it lightly, like a man joking with fate. But we hear it now like prophecy.
His mother, Boots, called him a “real Doctor to the Barrios.”
His uncle Adlai called him Doki.
His younger classmates knew him as Red - brilliant, mischievous, that impish boy who ran through the homes of aunts and uncles who spoiled him rotten. The boy who became a man fueled, quite literally, by thousands of eggs, the hens his parents raised so he could study at the Cebu Institute of Medicine. His medical degree was earned one egg at a time. His diplomates? Those came from worms, from the quiet underground army that produced the fertilizer his family sold to send him to trainings in occupational health and diabetes.
Who else among us can say such things? That our education was nourished by hens and earthworms? That our dreams were harvested from soil and sweat? Dr. Avelex could. Because nothing about his life was handed to him. Everything was grown. Everything was earned. Everything was shared.
To us, his medical school batchmates, he was this big, lumbering, mischievous fellow—always a little larger than life, always carrying with him a kind of effortless brightness. He had a way of seeing the light side of things without trivializing them, a way of cracking open the heaviness of our days with one well-timed grin or a gentle teasing remark. While the rest of us pored over books with the desperation of people trying to outrun failure, he somehow managed to cope with the grind of medical school without breaking a sweat. He absorbed pressure the way he absorbed everything else with concealed non-compromise, with humor, patience, and with that familiar shrug that said, “Kaya ra na. Relax lang.” Through all the sleepless nights, the exams, the rounds, the chaos—he never once lost himself. He stayed soft. He stayed kind. He stayed unmistakably him.
He could have gone abroad.
He could have joined a private hospital with marble floors and air-conditioned hallways.
He could have built a prosperous practice in the city.
But Avelex chose the public market SM: Sa Mercado where he opened a wellness club among the noise of vendors and tricycles. He was an advocate for the environment. He fought diabetes not from a podium, but from a plastic chair beside the people who could not afford specialists. He sold herbs, he ran a clinic on the side, he borrowed money, hundreds of thousands in fact, just to buy medicines he would never charge to the very patients who needed them.
When he died, he had P20 in his pocket.
And a P30,000 debt at the pharmacy.
Because every pill, every vial, every tablet had gone to someone else.
How many doctors have we known who died poorer than their patients?
How many who gave more than they kept?
How many who believed so deeply in service that the ledger of their life ends with a negative balance but a soul overflowing?
The logbook was what began it.
His insistence that every after-hours hospital transaction be recorded.
Such a simple thing ink on paper, names and numbers aligned.
But in two weeks, hospital income surged by P40,000.
That is the price of honesty.
That is the cost of refusing to sign tampered DTRs.
That is what integrity looks like in a place where shadows are more comfortable than sunlight.
It makes you wonder:
How does a country swallow its own healers?
How do we end up with tarpaulins outside hospitals demanding justice for doctors who died with the same passion with which they healed?
Dr. Avelex was the one of the many doctors killed in the past years.
A pattern of silence punctuated by gunshots.
These are not deaths; they are indictments.
Each co**se is an audit trail.
Each funeral is evidence.
We have created a climate where the people who run toward danger - the physicians, the rural healers are left exposed while those who profit from dysfunction retreat into air-conditioned safety.
But here is what the killers did not understand:
You cannot kill a man whose life was built on the service of others.
You cannot silence someone whose very existence was a protest against apathy.
Avelex may have stepped out of his vehicle on a remote stretch of highway, alone.
But he does not lie alone now.
He is carried by every patient he healed, every barrio he served, every colleague he inspired, every hospital staff who pinned a black ribbon and whispered, “He cared for us. He cared for everyone.”
The Amors responded to violence with vision.
The Dr. Avelex S. Amor Fellowship in Medicine was born, not as a memorial, but as a continuation.
Adlai said, “We will fight back by helping train more doctors to work with poor Filipinos.”
That is how you defeat murderers: not by burying the dead, but by multiplying their mission.
The Amor family understood something the rest of us are only beginning to grasp:
You cannot extinguish a flame that has learned to spread.
Today, in this medical congress organized by his own batchmates, we stand in the shadow of a man who was not just a physician. He was proof, crippling, inconvenient proof, that goodness is still possible in public service. That sincerity still exists.
That courage can still be quiet and everyday and unadorned.
But we also stand on a line we can no longer pretend not to see.
A moral waterline drawn across our conscience by his death.
Above it, the country we want.
Below it, the country we have allowed.
Avelex tried to raise people’s bodies from illness.
Now it is our turn to raise this nation from indifference.
Because the question that haunts us is not simply:
Who killed Dr. Avelex Amor?
It is also:
What conditions allowed him to be killed?
What values do we uphold?
What corruption do we tolerate?
What silence do we accept?
We cannot resurrect him.
But we can resurrect what he stood for.
And perhaps that is the heavier task.
In the days after his funeral, someone wrote that grief is just love with nowhere to go.
But Avelex has given our grief a direction.
He has turned our sorrow into seed.
He has turned our anger into advocacy.
He has turned our mourning into movement.
To Nexus 2.0, his brothers and sisters in medicine, this is the hard truth:
Avelex is not asking us to remember him.
He is asking us to continue him.
To keep our logbooks honest.
To turn away from tampering and towards truth.
To serve not the powerful, but the powerless.
To choose genuine public service over comfort.
To heal with hands that never count the cost.
To live in such a way that when death comes, it will find us empty—not of spirit, but of all the love we spent on others.
In the end, his father said, “Despite the threats, he chose to serve and die for the people. It was a worthy death.”
Maybe the worthiness lies not in how he died, but in what he lived for.
And so we return to that highway, that morning, that stillness.
We imagine the moment after the gunshots faded, when the air must have held its breath, unsure of what had just been lost.
But if you listen closely, beyond the horror, beyond the grief, beyond the impossible unfairness, you hear something else.
Not silence.
Not ending.
But a beginning.
A heartbeat continuing in the chests of those he left behind.
A vow forming on the lips of every doctor who hears his story.
A reminder that somewhere in this wounded archipelago, there was a man named Avelex Amor who loved the poor enough to die for them.
And now we must love this country enough to live for it, and to fight for it.
Thank you for joining us in remembering our dear Avelex.
- NEXUS 2.0 - CIM Class of 2000
