COLOMBIA MOURNS SLAIN ARCHBISHOP

Probe Focuses On Drug Traffickers, Official Reports

CALI, Colombia -- After filing past the open casket of slain Archbishop
Isaias Duarte on Sunday, Maria Cristina Rosas fought back her tears.

"We've lost all of our values," said Rosas, a housewife, her voice trembling
inside Cali's cool, dark cathedral. "Now, not even the church is safe."

Two gunmen shot the Roman Catholic archbishop at point-blank range Saturday
night as he left a Mass wedding ceremony he had presided over in a poor
neighborhood in Cali, Colombia's third largest city.

The 63-year-old was one of seven archbishops in Colombia and the highest-
ranking clergyman ever killed in a country torn by decades of violence.

A wooden cross and bouquets marked the spot where the archbishop had
collapsed after being riddled with bullets, some 50 feet from the front door
of the lime-green church.

The government offered a $434,000 reward for information on the gunmen or
those who ordered the slaying, and Colombia's attorney general told the
Associated Press that the investigation was centering on drug traffickers.

Shortly before March 10 legislative elections, Duarte had said some
candidates were financing their campaigns with drug money. He did not name
names despite calls by President Andres Pastrana for him to do so.

"The first hypothesis points to hot money of drug traffickers and their
relationship with subversives, because of the recent statements the
archbishop made," Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio told AP in a telephone
interview.

By "subversives," Osorio meant leftist rebels who have been financing their
38-year war against the government by producing cocaine, which is exported
to the United States and beyond by traffickers.

A top church official in Cali, the Rev. German Robledo, said, "We presume
this was the work of drug traffickers."

Robledo said Duarte made his public remarks about the elections after parish
priests presented him with evidence that at least three drug trafficking
organizations in the area were buying votes and financing candidates.

Thousands in this largely Roman Catholic country came to pay their respects
Sunday, forming a line that stretched for many blocks from the colonial-era
cathedral downtown. Dressed in white vestments, Duarte's body was laid out
in an open wooden casket flanked by white-helmeted military police and
illuminated by candles.

Workers broke through the cathedral's tile floor with picks and shovels and
dug into the rich brown earth beneath, readying the grave for his burial
Tuesday.

Sister Gloria Ocampo described Duarte as an outspoken champion of the poor,
who built dozens of schools in Cali's poorest neighborhoods during his seven
years as archbishop of Colombia's third-largest city.

"He was a very sincere person, who talked without considering the
consequences," she said. "He criticized the drug traffickers, the guerrillas
and the paramilitaries -- everybody who was against peace."

Outside the cathedral, hundreds of people held hands to protest Duarte's
killing. Pinned to their shirts were paper targets symbolizing that
civilians are frequent targets in Colombia's civil war.

Among them was Guillermo Zuniga, who in 1999 was kidnapped from a Cali
church along with his wife and dozens of other worshippers by rebels of the
National Liberation Army.

They spent months as hostages, sometimes hearing Duarte on the radio telling
the captives to take heart. The archbishop's messages were "a breath of air
for those being held by the guerrillas," Zuniga said.

Presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe, whose calls for a tough stance against
the rebels have put him ahead in opinion polls for the May 26 vote, drew a
round of applause from onlookers as he visited the cathedral. He was
longtime acquaintance of Duarte.

Pastrana also visited the cathedral after meeting with local officials and
top military and security aides in Cali, in the lush, green lowlands of
southwestern Colombia. Police released sketches of the suspected gunmen,
both young men.

Before coming to Cali, Duarte was a bishop in a war-wracked northern region,
where he gained a reputation for criticizing not only the guerrillas, but
also right-wing paramilitaries who have massacred people they suspect of
sympathizing with the rebels.

Pope John Paul II, who named Duarte archbishop in 1995, said Sunday that the
cleric had "paid the highest price" for defending human life and opposing
violence.

"I urge Colombians once again to follow the way of dialogue, excluding all
types of violence, blackmail and kidnapping of people and to firmly commit
themselves to what are the true roads of peace," the pope said at St.
Peter's Square in the Vatican.

Colombia's war has intensified since peace talks with the main rebel group,
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, collapsed in February.

Other leading Catholic prelates who have been slain in Latin America include
Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who decried the brutality of the
country's military during its civil war; Guatemalan bishop Juan Jose
Gerardi, assassinated in 1998 after accusing the military of human rights
abuses during its civil war; and Mexico's Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas
Ocampo, killed in 1993 by drug traffickers.