José Álvarez Fernández

José Álvarez Fernández, OP (16 May 1890 – 19 October 1970), better known as "Padre Apaktone",

He was ordained as priest on 1916 at the age of 26 and a year after he travelled to Peru to start his missionary work with the approval of the Dominican Province in Spain. Together with other religious missionaries, he began his mission on Good Friday of 1917, in the jungle of Madre de Dios region, traveling the following years from river to river to meet people abused and exploited by rubber tappers and industries. During his missionary works, he came into contact with countless tribes, some very violent, with whose chiefs he established friendship, but sometimes he suffers threats and unforeseen attacks. Because of his great evangelizing talent and aptitude in learning the native's languages, he brought peace and dialogue and became a mediator between ethnic communities, eventually gaining their support and respects. In the 1960s, the Amarakaeris, one of the Peruvian Amazonia tribes with which Álvarez lived renamed him "Apaktone", which means "big father" or "old father". Since then, all the tribal and local communities in the region started calling him as such. granting him the title "Servant of God".

Crescencio Palomo, the national postulator of his cause, said of him on the closing of diocesan inquiry on his life and holiness: