Unlikely human rights warrior Zara Alvarez fought to the end

Small and bespectacled Zara Alvarez, shot dead this week by motorcycle hitmen, looked an unlikely human rights warrior.

Zara Alvarez in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2019.

Small and bespectacled, Zara Alvarez looked an unlikely human rights warrior, though in reality she had endured more than her share of injustice by the time she was shot six times outside­ a convenience store by motorcycle hitmen in the execu­tion style that has become a mark of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency.

The 39-year-old single mother spent two years in jail on politically motivated charges that were thrown out in March for lack of evidence, and over more than a decade of advocacy for some of The Philippines’ poorest and most vulnerable workers she had been subjected to threats and ­harassment.

She was briefly named in 2018 as a state terrorist by the government alongside more than 600 fellow human rights workers, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The list was eventually culled down to just eight, but the damage had been done.

Her death on Monday night in Bacolod City, on Negros Island, is the 13th for the human rights alliance­ Karapatan since Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016.

It was also The Philippines’ second political killing in a week and came just hours after protesters in Manila demanded justice over the murder of 72-year-old agrarian reform activist Randall Echanis, who was stabbed to death on August 10 by at least five men who scaled a ladder to his second-floor apartment.

Both had been “red tagged” as alleged communists — a form of political harassment in The Philippines against activists — and had featured on anonymous hit lists posted in their communities.

Two months ago, a UN report highlighted the “widespread and systematic” extrajudicial killing of thousands of people in The Philippines under Duterte, through his war on drugs but also the targeting of critics. It detailed evidence of 248 lawyers, rights advocates, unionists and journalists red-tagged as communists or terrorists and subsequently murdered between 2015 and 2019.

Still, the killings continue, unabated­ even by a pandemic that has confined millions of people to their homes, and millions more to abject poverty while the government fumbles its response.

“Human rights defenders, farm­ers, farmworkers and civilians are being slayed one after the other with brazen impunity,” the International Coalition for Human Rights in The Philippines said this week. “These are our colleagues­ and fellow human rights advocates who are being killed like cattle.”

On Wednesday night, presidential spokesman Harry Roque condemned the killings of Ms Alvarez and Mr Echanis but rejected­ “unfounded” allegations that they were murdered by state security forces. He urged everyone to await the conclusion of police investigations, though few believe that will lead to justice.

On Negros, The Philippines’ sugar bowl, where plantation owners with private armies have long profited from the exploit­ation of farm workers, executions have become almost commonplace since Duterte ordered a crackdown in 2018 on a long-simmering communist insurgency.

“The problem is, most of the people who they kill — even in police operations or official milit­ary operations — are not armed rebels but civilians,” says Karapatan secretary general Cristina Pala­bay. “The pattern of threats against Zara point to the fact that the people who had her killed, or killed her, are state forces.”

Ms Palabay said she had been crushed by the death of her “brave and selfless” colleague who “chose to fight the fears and threats head-on”.

Ms Alvarez worked in Negros as a community health worker and then, after her 2014 release from jail, as an advocate for politic­al prisoners. She docu­ment­ed the many executions and human rights violations there for a report to the UN Human Rights Council.

Late last year, following the murder on Negros of human rights lawyer Ben Ramos in simil­ar circumstances, she spoke to Al Jazeera about the police operations that were targeting not only insurgents but those who dared criticise the government.

“Even with some dangers, we still investigate human rights viol­ations because we believe the persons in authority won’t do it,” she said. “In the recent killings, it’s very clear it was the police who killed those victims.” She leaves behind an 11-year-old daughter.