Column

In Colombia, priest gives it his all - and his life

When I met Father Saulo Carreno in March, he was dodging bullets. One of them got him last week, ending the life of a young Roman Catholic priest in the war-torn town of Saravena, Colombia. Infamously known as "Sara-bomba," it is one of Colombia's most violent towns.

Over the years, I have interviewed a fair number of people who have subsequently been assassinated. Some were involved in violent causes and their deaths came as no great shock.

But Father Carreno's death is especially sad. First, he impressed me enormously the day I met him at his church residence on the bombed-out town square. Second, it's unlikely we'll know precisely why he was killed, or by whom.

Saravena has been a stronghold of guerrillas of the National Army of Liberation, ELN, for many years. This year it has come under siege from paramilitary gunmen and government spies, as well as rival guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

On a major smuggling route on the Venezuelan border and close to a strategic oil pipeline, the town had become a flash point for Colombia's competing forces.

Father Saulo knew he was was walking a tightrope. The previous Sunday, a bullet whizzed past his ear as he said Mass. He showed me where it had lodged in the wall behind the altar. The church windows had been blown out so many times by guerrilla efforts to mortar the heavily sand-bagged police station on the opposite side of the square, he no longer bothered to have the glass replaced.

His car had been shot up recently, and he had briefly been held hostage by guerrillas while mediating the release of town council members who had been kidnapped.

He spoke in hushed tones as he sized up his visitors that day - I was accompanied by a colleague from the Wall Street Journal. We were trying to figure him out too. He had a badly disfigured hand, the result of a fireworks accident, he said. We wondered if he might have handled something more powerful - explosives perhaps?

In towns like Saravena, it's hard to know who's who. The local military had insinuated Father Saulo might be a guerrilla collaborator. But the military seemed to suspect everyone in town, from the chamber of commerce to local human rights activists. While we were there, federal prosecutors with a heavily armed military escort were interrogating staff at the local hospital for allegedly smuggling medical supplies to the guerrillas. Last month, prosecutors arrested about 30 municipal officials in the nearby town of Arauca on charges of guerrilla collaboration.

To be sure, Father Saulo started out criticizing the government for corruption and failing to provide essential public services in the region.

"For the state to recover control here they have to offer social investment and access to credit for the farmers," he said.

But the guerrillas had done little for the town.

"They took over power and nothing has changed," he said. "There hasn't been the social transformation they promised in their ideology."

Townspeople were losing patience with the guerrillas, he warned. Father Saulo was one of several community members who held meetings with the guerrillas.

"We told them, "You are wearing out the people,"' he said.

He asked us to be discreet in what we wrote about our meeting. In the wake of the government offensive, one thing was sure, he said: "The guerrillas are not going to stay quiet. There will be more terrorist attacks."

Father Saulo was shot several times in broad daylight on Tuesday by two men riding on a motorcycle as he drove through town, police said. He had just left the hospital a few blocks from the church where he had visited patients. He died immediately.

"It's very sad," police Chief Col. Luis Alcides Morales said in a phone interview. "He was a dedicated man and his death only shows the degree of degradation of the conflict."

No one has claimed responsibility. But police are looking for an ELN hit man, based on a witness' description.

From our conversation with Father Saulo, it seems reasonable to suspect it was the guerrillas who killed him. But in a place like Saravena, you can never be sure.

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