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COLOMBIA: LEFTIST GUERRILLAS THREATEN, KILL CHRISTIANS
Pastors are issued warnings in north; evangelists murdered in southwest.
Having been sentenced to die by leftist rebels for holding Christian worship services in 2006, a pastor in Colombia’s northern department of Arauca took seriously the death threats that guerrillas issued on Friday (March 13), according to Christian support organization Open Doors.
The rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN) phoned a pastor of Ebenezer Church in Saravena at 5:30 a.m., telling him to meet them at a site on the Arauca River at 7 a.m. When the pastor, who requested anonymity, arrived at the landing, the guerrillas took him by canoe to the other side of the river – into Venezuela – then drove him to a guerrilla camp some 40 minutes away.
For the next three hours, the rebels warned him that area pastors had three options: cooperate with the revolutionary cause of the guerrillas, leave or die. Although the ELN has been at odds with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in Arauca they co-exist without conflict.
FARC guerrillas control the southwestern department of Huila, where last November four Christians were killed. Farley Cortés was killed on Nov. 5 in Plumeros village, Hermes Coronado Granado was killed on Nov. 8 in Santana Ramos, and 10 days later a married couple, Dora Lilia Saavedra and Ferney Ledezma were also killed there.
Guerrillas seized Saavedra, 40, and the 35-year-old Ledezma from the school where Saavedra taught on Nov. 18, bound them on the floor of an old house and shot them several times.
Their pastor, Hernan Camacho, has moved with his family out of the area after receiving death threats. “[The FARC guerrillas] say that we, the evangelical ones, are their worst enemy because we teach the people not to take up weapons,” Pastor Camacho said.
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