ASSASSIN HAS FAITH IN GOD: KILLERS IN COLOMBIA FIND RELIGION

MEDELLIN, Colombia Francisco stares at the concrete floor, eyes shielded
by delicate lashes that flutter as he recounts his rescue from a life of
murder.

"God changed me completely," Francisco says. "There is no comparison to
what my life was like before."

As he talks, Francisco's small hands dance, clasping between knees, waving
in the air to punctuate phrases, wringing slowly as if in tortured prayer.

Bred in the rough hillside slums of Medellin, a city infamous for cocaine
and killers, Francisco's life mirrors that of many area young men.

When he was 12, Francisco says, he ran away from home to escape his
father's beatings. By 14, he says, he carried an automatic rifle as a
gunman for Pablo Escobar, perhaps Colombia's most notorious cocaine
smuggler, who was killed by police four years ago.

He spent most of his teenage years and early 20s killing, first for
Escobar, then for himself, says Francisco, who asks that his last name not
be used for fear of retribution.

"Killing becomes so common, so easy," he says. "You lose all your feeling
about it."

But at 24, jailed for the seventh time after trying to dynamite his
girlfriend's house, Francisco says he found Jesus Christ.

Now, three years later and out of prison, Francisco works as a poorly paid
security guard and does youth outreach for a Protestant evangelical church.
He faces frequent murder threats from former cronies and has constant money
worries. But he revels in his new being.

"God took the hate out of me," Francisco says.

Still, hatred ravages much of Colombia. Civil war scars its countryside.
Street crime, gang warfare and murderous squabbles within families and
between neighbors seize many of its cities.

Medellin remains among the most violent places in the world, despite a
decline in drugrelated bloodshed in recent years. About 4,000 people, most
of them poor young men, are still murdered each year in this city of 1.8
million.

Across Colombia, many people desperately search for a way to end the
violence. They call on the national government to make peace with leftist
rebels, on city officials to pacify the street gangs, on the rich to share
the wealth and on the poor to learn patience. Yet the bloodshed refuses to
yield.

Francisco, who spent much of his life helping perpetrate the slaughter,
says the solution doesn't lie in wellmeaning talk or grandiose proposals.
The answer, he says, is at once simpler and far more profound.

"Peace isn't achieved through talking," he says in a near whisper. "Peace
begins in each soul. Peace is born in the heart of a man."

Francisco spins his life story in a small classroom tucked inside the
compound of Faith and Hope Center, a Protestant evangelical church on the
poor northern fringe of Medellin.

The church has been in the city for decades, says Carlos Cardenas, one of
its young ministers. But in the past three years, Faith and Hope's
membership has doubled to 6,000 as its ministers have moved into the slums,
offering a gospel of family unity, personal responsibility and a forgiving,
if rigid, God.

Cardenas estimates that at least 500 members of the congregation are former
assassins like Francisco, who found release from the murderous life of
their neighborhoods in the church's fundamentalist message.

"They became Christians, and their lives were transformed," says Cardenas,
32, who directs the church's family programs.

"The disintegration of the family is the principal cause of the problem of
violence," he says. "The family nucleus is almost destroyed in Colombia."

Gang members' interest in the church continues to increase, Cardenas says,
as ministers make inroads into the poor neighborhoods.

Despite the attraction of a growing number of Colombians to fundamentalist
churches, however, the nation remains overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

Many of those responsible for the country's bloodshed consider themselves
solid Catholics, observers say. Assassins often pray to the Virgin Mary
before and after a killing, invoking her protection and thanking her if
things go smoothly.

"He who sins and prays comes out even," counsels a proverb often heard on
the streets of Medellin.

Catholic officials say the killers' cult of the Virgin Mary reflects an
ignorance of church teachings and Christian faith, rather than any church
sanction of their profession.

"It is at times a very folkloric religiousness," says Monsignor Guillermo
Vega, 67, who runs a church office devoted to social work in Medellin's
slums. "We have to work with these people, give them a moral basis."

Believing poverty foments much of the city's violence, Vega and other
Catholic clergy push economic development programs.

"People are not isolated from their economic and social conditions," Vega
says. "We are very conscious that the human being has to change. But you
have to see him in the context of where he is from. People need work. They
need money."

Ministers at Faith and Hope Center argue, however, that recourse to
bloodshed has little to do with economic conditions.

"We believe you must change the person, and the rest will follow," Cardenas
says.

Founded by U.S. missionaries, Faith and Hope Center is now largely run by
Colombian ministers. To accommodate the swelling number of faithful, church
officials are renovating the main building and raising the roof. Services
are held four or five times a week in the main building and at least that
often in smaller churches in the slums.

There is a lot to be done, church leaders say, because the demons never rest.

"The evil passes from generation to generation," Francisco says of the
murderous culture of the hillside slums where he was reared. "It's like a
curse. The only thing that has broken the cycle is the power of Jesus Christ."

Like many others in Medellin's slums, Francisco's family arrived penniless
a generation ago after fleeing the political violence that has rocked rural
Colombia for decades.

His father found work in construction, and the family never lacked food,
Francisco says. But when his father drank, which was often, he beat
Francisco, his mother, his brothers and sisters.

By the time Francisco ran away from home, he says, an older brother was
already working for Escobar.

"My group was one of the few that Escobar had as his escort, that he
trusted," Francisco says, his voice somehow boastful despite frequent
condemnations of the drug lord. "We used to play soccer with him."

After the Colombian government went after Escobar in earnest in 1989, the
drug baron offered a bounty for each police officer or prosecutor who was
killed. Francisco says members of his gang accepted the offer with enthusiasm.

About the same time, rivals killed Francisco's older brother and badly
wounded a younger one. Francisco pledged revenge.

"Knowing that there was no justice, I turned against all that (politicians
and police) stood for," he recalls. "It's when my heart started filling
with hate."

After Escobar died, Francisco and other young gunmen suddenly found
themselves without a sure way to make a living. Like many others, Francisco
drifted into a militia, one of the armed, urban groups linked to Colombia's
leftist guerrillas whose members live by a bizarre code of criminal intent,
vigilante justice and revolutionary vision.

"Supposedly, we just killed the drug users, the thieves," Francisco says of
his days as a militiaman. "It was a lie. We really were just looking for
power and money for ourselves. We became interested in having the best
shoes, the best clothes. The world offered us everything money, fame,
women."

Convicted of trying to blow up a girlfriend's house after her father
insulted him, Francisco says he was sentenced to four years in Medellin's
roughest prison.

While in jail, he says, he began running an assassination business,
ordering the killings for hire of people outside the prison.

"We gained so much fame, that after a while," he says, "every murder that
was committed, people said we did it."

Convicted of one of the murders, Francisco had 25 years added to his sentence.

His murderous inclinations, he says, turned to blood lust. He fantasized
about killing everyone he knew, anyone he met. He plotted the killings of
cousins, uncles and other family members.

After six months in prison, Francisco became convinced he was going to be
murdered. He had a lot of enemies. Everyone was suspect. He rarely slept at
night and spent his days sitting in the prison yard with his back to the wall.

"I became desperate," he says.

Francisco started working as a clerk in the prison's evangelical chapel.
His interest in the chapel had nothing to do with religion, however,
Francisco says. It was just the best scam available. A prisoner could get
two days off a sentence for every day spent working or studying.

But one night as he lay awake on his bed listening for assassins, Francisco
says he started crying uncontrollably and surprised himself by praying.

"God, if you exist, protect me, change me," he pleaded.

A peace came over him, Francisco says, but he wasn't yet a bornagain man.
A few days later, sitting with his back to the prison wall, he says the
conversion came.

"It was like I had a cold bucket of water thrown on me," he says. "I was
clapping and singing and laughing and shouting.

"Everyone was looking at me like I was crazy, but I didn't care," he says.
"I didn't understand it then, but now I know that the Holy Spirit was in me."

Two weeks later, Francisco says, his sentence was reduced, and he was
released from prison. He doesn't elaborate about why he was set loose so
early. He only says it was God's will.

"He did it, so I could do his work," Francisco says of his parttime
preaching to gang members in the slums on behalf of Faith and Hope Center.

As Francisco talks, the church compound fills with people arriving for
Wednesdaynight services. The new arrivals stand outside the classroom,
loudly exchanging greetings and gossip.

Although he never speaks much above a whisper, Francisco stops talking each
time someone man, woman or child gets too close to the room's open
door or windows.

His newfound faith has convinced Francisco that he'll go to God when he
dies. But it hasn't made him eager to take a bullet or a blade.

"They send somebody you know," he explains, almost apologetically, the
first time he gets up to check for listeners at a window. "They never send
an enemy. They'll send your best friend to kill you."

Francisco says former friends and enemies have tried to kill him four times
since he became a bornagain Christian. The last attempt came just six
months ago. Each time, Francisco says, God kept him alive.

Still, murderous evil lingers.

Soon after his conversion, Francisco says, an associate from his gangland
days offered him thousands of dollars to kill someone. Francisco's wife was
pregnant, their house badly needed work, and he was broke.

The offer was tempting, Francisco says. But he decided that God would
provide for his wife, himself and their unborn child.

"God forgives, but the consequences of an evil life still follow you," he
says. "I have felt the lure of the demons."

Francisco finishes talking and picks up his Bible. Electric guitar music
from the church's main hall signals that services are about to begin. He
doesn't want to be late.

By the time Francisco walks into the main hall, more than 1,000 people fill
the rows of folding metal chairs and benches beneath an incomplete tin roof
that leaves part of the room open to the sky.

Shabbily dressed families from the slums mix with well attired couples
from Medellin's middleclass and wealthy neighborhoods.

The small band cranks out music loud enough to summon the angels. The
assembly sings along, following the lyrics flashed on the front wall by an
overhead projector.

Three skinny teenagers with the cropped hair and baggy clothing that are
uniforms of urban gangs slouch shyly in one of the back rows. Paper badges
stuck to their chests identify the boys as firsttime visitors.

"We pray that you give us hope, Lord," intones the young minister leading
the service. "How many massacres do we suffer? How many killings of young
men? Free us from this, Lord. Give us hope, Lord. Give us peace."

Eyes squeezed closed, lips moving silently, the three boys pray along. One
of them, his body shaking slightly, thrusts open palms toward the heavens.

Through the halffinished ceiling, a few early stars wink, pinpricks in the
darkened sky.

Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle