Colombia To Proceed With Presidential Elections Despite Candidate's Slaying
With a third presidential candidate assassinated, Colombia's government refused Friday to put off next month's election and vowed to keep up the fight against drug traffickers. A telefaxed communique, purportedly from the Medellin drug cartel, denied responsibility Friday for the assassination of presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro, who died in a hail of bullets Thursday aboard a Colombian jetliner carrying 97 people. But on Thursday, within hours of Pizarro's assassination, a man had called the national radio network station Caracol and related in detail how the cartel had allegedly ordered the former guerrilla's killing. The authenticity of neither claim could be verified. That is not the first time there have been contradictory communiques, verbal and faxed, claiming and and then denying responsibility for assassinations and terrorist acts. Friday's telefax accused police of instigating violence in order to force the government to continue its crackdown on traffickers, and accused the police of putting out false communiques purported to be from the cartel. The August assassination of another candidate, Sen. Luis Carlos Galan of the governing Liberal Party, prompted the government to launch a U.S.-backed crackdown on Colombia's cocaine cartels. Since then, drug traffickers have killed more than 230 people, including judges, politicians, policemen, soldiers, newspaper employees and two other presidential candidates. Leaders of the leftist Patriotic Union Party, whose candidate was slain last month, urged the government to cancel the May 27 vote. But Interior Minister Horacio Serpa told reporters Friday that the elections will not be postponed or canceled. In a televised speech late Thursday, Serpa said the government will fight terrorists ``without rest.'' On Friday, thousands of men, women and children filed past Pizarro's coffin, displayed in an open patio in the Congress building. Supporters of Pizarro's M-19 movement burned buses and threw rocks at police in clashes in several cities. Hundreds of leftist guerrillas belonging to the M-19 rebel group laid down their arms last month and formed a political party with Pizarro as its presidential candidate. Government officials had said Pizarro could have helped mediate peace agreements with other leftist insurgents. Governing party candidate Cesar Gaviria, the presidential front-runner, suspended campaign activities following the Pizarro killing. In a radio interview, he condemned the killing as another act by ``powerful organizations'' trying to impose an ``empire of evil and crime.'' The other candidates are Alvaro Gomez Hurtado and Rodrigo Lloreda, both of the Conservative Party. Gomez, suggesting that Barco does not have the confidence of Colombia's military, urged the president Friday to name a three-man council to run Colombia's security forces. He said such a move would help ensure peace in the last month of the presidential campaign. Barco, through a spokesman, rejected the proposal. The Patriotic Union's presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, was fatally wounded March 22 at the Bogota airport by an assassin with a machine gun. Pizarro's killer, 25-year-old Alvaro Rodriguez, was sitting two rows behind Pizarro on the flight and apparently retrieved the machine gun from an airplane bathroom before returning to his seat, Capt. Fabio Munevar told Caracol. Minutes later, he stood up, pulled the weapon from his black leather jacket, leaned forward and fired at Pizarro's head from about a foot away, Munevar said. Pizarro's bodyguards immediately killed the assassin. The plane, en route to the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla, returned immediately to Bogota. Pizarro died about an hour later at a hospital. The Bogota morgue said he was struck by 13 bullets. Two men with machine guns were arrested at Barranquilla airport, a police spokesman there said. They apparently were part of an assassination squad with orders to kill Pizarro if he survived the flight, police said. In another development, church officials in Medellin said they had foiled a plan to kill Colombia's Roman Catholic prelate, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo. The city's Catholic church said it discovered the plan to kill Lopez Trujillo after intercepting messages on a radio frequency used by the men plotting the crime. Three men disguised as police agents entered Lopez Trujillo's offices on Wednesday and Thursday asking for the prelate, but he was not in, said the church statement late Thursday. Lopez is archbishop of Medellin, the country's second-largest city, and chairman of Colombia's Bishops Conference.
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