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. Early life Garcia received his early education at the Ateneo de Manila University. Among his professors were the Filipino Jesuits Horacio de la Costa and Roque Ferriols. A seminarist, he finished his degree in philosophy at the Loyola House of Studies, School of Theology. His postgraduate studies came at Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Universidad Catolica in Lima, and Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. He did further studies on peace research at the University of Uppsala Peace Conflict Analysis Centre and the University of Oslo Blindhern Campus. He also did a fellowship at the University of Otago Peace Centre in Dunedin, New Zealand. Career Garcia served as researcher at the international secretariat of Amnesty International and is a member of the board of trustees of its local chapter. He also served as peace envoy and policy adviser at International Alert, a non-governmental peace-building organization working in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. He taught at Colegio de Mexico in the 1970s and regularly lectured at Escola de Pau (School of Peace) at Universitat de Barcelona and at the Erasmus Program on Human Rights, Migration, and Development at University of Bologna. Garcia also taught political science at the University of the Philippines and Latin American Studies at the Ateneo de Manila University. Garcia currently serves as consultant for the formation of scholar-athletes at Far Eastern University. He has written several opinion pieces published in the online news website Rappler. Political involvement