Garcia, Ed

Edmundo "Ed" Guidote Garcia (born February 3, 1943) is a Filipino human rights activist, peace advocate, and writer. Garcia is best known for having served as one of the framers of the 1987 Philippine Constitution wherein which he advocated for the inclusion of human rights and social justice provisions in the charter, under the mentorship of CHR chairman and the acknowledged "Father of Human Rights" Jose W. Diokno. In 1970, then a seminarist, he co-founded the militant youth political movement LAKASDIWA (Lakas ng Diwang Kayumanggi). The movement and its distinct political ideology (Filipino Social Democracy) sought to create a nonviolent path towards social change through a "parliamentary of the streets," drawing from diverse sources such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Liberation Theology, including indigenous philosophies. The group was conceived as an alternative to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) ideology of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the National Democratic Front (NDF) which called for armed struggle.