| Honorific Prefix: | Servant of God |
| José Álvarez Fernández | |
| Honorific Suffix: | OP |
| Birth Date: | 16 May 1890 |
| Birth Place: | Cuevas, Belmonte de Miranda, Asturias, Spain |
| Death Place: | Lima, Peru |
José Álvarez Fernández, OP (16 May 1890 – 19 October 1970), better known as "Padre Apaktone", was a Spanish Dominican friar and missionary in the Department of Madre de Dios of the Peruvian Amazonia. He was working as a health care support, evangelizer, mediator and educator to the various Indigenous peoples of Peru for 53 years.
Álvarez was born on 16 May 1890 in Cuevas in Belmonte de Miranda, Asturias.[1]
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.[2] 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.[2]
Álvarez also made hundreds of expeditions through the Madre de Dios River basin and jungles. Due to his discovery of hidden places along the region and recording the native inhabitants culture, he became a member of the Geographical Society of Lima.[3] 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.[1] [2]
During his final years, Álvarez dedicated his time studying the original native vocabulary, praying, writing about his expeditions, and arranging the missions he had formed since he arrived in Peru.[2] He died on 19 October 1970, at the age of 80, in Lima, where had to stay in his last years of life to his health problems.[1]
On the day of his death, a small sheet with his autobiography was found in his breviary:
On 11 May 2007, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lima received the nihil obstat from the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, signaling the approval to initiate the beatification proceedings of Fernández,[4] granting him the title "Servant of God".[5]
Crescencio Palomo, the national postulator of his cause, said of him on the closing of diocesan inquiry on his life and holiness: