Today, on the 17th of August 2025, KARAPATAN remembers Zara Alvarez, one of its most courageous and dedicated human rights workers, who was gunned down by suspected state agents near her home in Bacolod City five years ago under the fascist Duterte regime.
As Duterte enjoys the right to due process accorded by the International Criminal Court through a valid warrant, provision of legal counsel, decent detention cell, visits from family, material time and resources to defend himself before the court on the charges of crimes against humanity, Zara and thousands of victims of extrajudicial killings are deprived of the most basic right – the right to live. Justice remains a distant goal, while Duterte, his cohorts and his foot soldiers remain unpunished for the violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that they so arrogantly perpetrated with impunity.
Zara was a paralegal and education director of Karapatan-Negros and was also a former student leader, teacher, church and community health worker.
Zara Alvarez’s persecution and subsequent killing starkly illustrates the very real dangers faced by victims of red- and terror-tagging. Since the early 2000s, Zara had been incessantly red-tagged and received death threats for her activism.
Like many other activists, Zara was falsely accused by the military of being a member of the New People’s Army. In 2012, she was arrested and detained on trumped-up murder charges, but was allowed to post bail after being behind bars for close to two years. She continued her work as a human rights defender, which included speaking engagements abroad to expose human rights violations and seek solidarity support for victims in her home island of Negros.
In February 2018, the Duterte regime escalated its attacks against Zara by including her name on a list of about 600 individuals who were branded as terrorists. Her name and that of many others were later dropped from the “terror list,” and the bogus murder charges against her were eventually dismissed in March 2020 for lack of evidence. But her persecution continued.
Five months later, she became the 13th human rights worker killed under the fascist Duterte regime.
Zara Alvarez exemplified the red-tagged victim who ran the gamut of being vilified, unjustly arrested, detained and exonerated only to be extrajudicially killed in the end for persisting in her advocacy and defense of human rights.
Today, we honor her, a comrade whose body was felled by bullets but whose memory and life’s work live on in our continuing struggle to attain justice for her and all other victims of political repression and exact accountability from the dastardly perpetrators of human rights violations.