Alejandro Labaka and Inés Arango

Alejandro Labaka Ugarte was born at Beizama in the Basque Country on 19 April 1920, entered the Capuchin Friars, took the religious name Manuel, professed solemn vows in 1942, and was ordained a priest in 1945. Missionary service first took him to Pingliang in China, from which the Communist government expelled him in 1953, and then to Ecuador. Inés Arango Velásquez was born at Medellín on 6 April 1937, the eleventh of twelve children. She entered the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters of the Holy Family, received the name María de las Nieves de Medellín, and made perpetual profession in 1959. She spent nearly twenty years teaching before joining her congregation's first mission to Aguarico in 1977. Their distinct lives converged through one ecclesial mission rather than through a single religious institute.

Labaka served in Pifo, Aguarico, and Guayaquil, became apostolic prefect in 1965, participated in the final session of the Second Vatican Council, and returned after a resignation and period of rest to direct missionary work among Indigenous communities. When Aguarico became an apostolic vicariate in 1984, he was ordained its bishop. Arango worked at Nuevo Rocafuerte in a hospital and in communities along the Napo River before serving at Coca among Huaorani people. Both learned from sustained local presence and worked amid pressure from petroleum extraction and logging. They understood that uncontrolled outside contact could bring dispossession, disease, and violence. Their final journey arose from an effort to establish peaceful communication with the Tagaeri before armed workers or mercenaries entered the territory.

Labaka's Capuchin profession and episcopal ministry joined evangelization to defense of Indigenous life, territory, and agency. Arango's consecrated vocation joined prayer, education, nursing, and missionary availability; in a note written the day before her death, she made clear that she sought neither fame nor a remembered name. Their decision was not a canonically established martyrdom. The causes initially proceeded under martyrdom, but the Roman study concluded that the necessary proof of hatred of the faith on the killers' part was lacking. The more exact category is offering of life: each freely accepted a proximate and certain risk of death for charity after a Christian life at least ordinarily virtuous. That juridical precision protects both Catholic teaching and the Tagaeri from being cast simplistically as religious persecutors.^[1][2]

Their common legacy lies in pastoral defense of peoples living in voluntary isolation and in an approach that refused to separate evangelization from human dignity. Labaka opposed threats to Huaorani and Tagaeri territories, appealed to Ecuadorian authorities, promoted dialogue, and tried to avert an armed confrontation. Arango shared hospital work, education, evangelization, community leadership, and the same final peacemaking risk. A responsible account must not turn their deaths into authorization for intrusive contact: subsequent public policy, Indigenous testimony, epidemiology, and human-rights standards govern present decisions about isolated peoples. Nor should the precise violence of their deaths be displayed sensationally. Their remains were recovered on 22 July and buried in the cathedral at Coca, where memory of their self-offering continued within the local Church and their religious families.

The Apostolic Vicariate of Aguarico instructed the joined diocesan inquiry from 1996 to 2010, and the Roman dicastery validated its acts in 2013. After Pope Francis established offering of life as a distinct pathway in Maiorem hac dilectionem, the causes changed from alleged martyrdom to two separate examinations super oblatione vitae. Theologians voted favorably in June 2024 and the cardinals and bishops did so in May 2025. On 22 May 2025 Pope Leo XIV authorized separate decrees recognizing the heroic offering of life of Alejandro Labaka and Inés Arango. Their current titles are Venerable Servant of God Alejandro Labaka and Venerable Servant of God Inés Arango. Neither has been beatified, and neither may be called Blessed or Saint unless a later papal act follows the remaining canonical requirements.^[3]

The Venerable Servants of God have no authorized public liturgical cult or feast. The anniversary 21 July may be used for historical remembrance and private prayer, but it is not a feast, memorial, or optional memorial established by their Venerability decrees. Public churches and liturgical celebrations must observe the norms governing causes still in progress, including the prohibition against treating candidates as though they had already been beatified. Faithful may privately ask their intercession and may learn from their charity, while reported favors belong to competent investigation rather than promotional declaration. Any future beatification would require the judgment and act of the Roman Pontiff after fulfillment of the applicable requirements; the offering-of-life decree itself must never be described as canonization or recognized martyrdom.^[4]