Freedom fighter, Earth champion

Having retired from active politics in 2002, Heherson Alvarez may not be a name of recent recall among millennials. But those who seek the unvarnished truth about the arduous struggle against Marcos’ martial law would do well to get to know—albeit belatedly—the former senator, congressman, Cabinet official, environment warrior, and Marcos gadfly who, as a self-exiled opposition leader in the United States, lobbied the US Congress to withdraw support from the dictatorship by exposing its excesses.

Alvarez succumbed to COVID-19 last Monday. He was 80.

Alvarez’s political involvement started when he was a student activist at the University of the Philippines. In a 2002 interview, he recalled those turbulent years: “Learning happened in the classroom of the streets. We took our academic life in stride but viewed political and social change very seriously.”

As one of the youngest delegates nominated to the 1971 Constitutional Convention, Alvarez easily saw the body as part of the Marcos ruse to perpetuate himself in power by tinkering with the term limits set by the 1935 Charter. He refused to sign the Marcos-dictated Constitution and boldly walked out of the hall just as Marcos was about to deliver his speech.

Alvarez’s defiant move led to his being one of the most wanted opposition figures when martial law was declared a year later, with a shoot-to-kill-order from Marcos defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile. But he had gone underground by then, having been warned by the arrest of Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., Sen. Jose Diokno, and other prominent opposition figures the night before.

Disguised by a makeup artist of the Philippine Educational Theater Association, the activist theater company that his then girlfriend (now widow) Cecile Guidote had founded, Alvarez was soon smuggled on board a ship bound for Hong Kong and eventually the United States, where he was chosen to lead efforts to unite Filipinos in the United States and establish an opposition movement against the Marcos regime.

It wasn’t easy, Alvarez recalled later, as most of the early migrants in the United States had Ilocano roots and were staunchly loyal to Marcos. It took two years and house-to-house campaigning on a shoestring budget for him and other exiled opposition figures to gain headway. By gathering documents about the prime real estate in the United States that the Marcoses were gobbling up, the human rights abuses by the military back home, and the questionable Marcos wartime medals, the group gained media mileage in the United States and got the attention of American politicians who subsequently cut down US military support to Marcos.

But Alvarez paid a high price for his work in the movement: He never got to see his father again, a guerrilla during the Japanese occupation who died of a heart attack after Heherson’s brother Marsman, also an activist, was abducted and ruthlessly tortured. Marsman’s mutilated body was found in the churchyard of the Alvarezes’ hometown of Santiago, Isabela.

After the Marcoses were ousted in 1986, President Corazon Aquino appointed Alvarez secretary of agrarian reform, a post he used to help craft the Aquino administration’s centerpiece social reform policy, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. The program has had a spotty implementation over the decades, but it was the law he was proudest of, said Alvarez in an interview, as “it enabled the country to give 400,000 hectares to landless farmers in the countryside.”

In 1987, Alvarez ran and won a Senate seat where, as chair of the Senate committee on environment for 10 years, he authored the Clean Air Act and the National Integrated Protected Areas System Act, among others.

After two terms in the Senate, Alvarez was elected Isabela representative from 1998 to 2001. He was the principal complainant in the impeachment case against former president Joseph Ejercito Estrada in the lower House in 2000.

Under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Alvarez was appointed secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, where he continued his green advocacy. He also founded the Earth Savers Movement, headed the Climate Change Commission, and penned the resolution declaring April 22 of every year as “Earth Day” in the Philippines.

Talking to a newsman who had covered him since his Senate days, Alvarez mused at the wake of former Sen. Aquilino Pimentel Jr. last year that Filipinos should appreciate and guard the freedom they’re enjoying now by remembering those who had fought for it. If they don’t, they could easily lose it again, he said—a warning that seems to be ringing ever more true these days.