Archbishop Isaías Duarte Cancino

Isaías Duarte Cancino, priest: born San Gil, Colombia 15 February 1939; ordained priest 1963; vicar, cathedral of Bucaramanga 1964-88; Bishop of Apartadó 1988-95; Archbishop of Cali 1995-2002; died Cali, Colombia 16 March 2002.

Isaías Duarte Cancino, Archbishop of the city of Cali, the third in importance in Colombia, was assassinated on Saturday in classic Colombian style, by two young men on a motor cycle. He had just finished marrying 104 couples in the parish church of the Good Shepherd in the city's poor district of Aguablanca. It is not yet clear whether the assassins were left-wing guerrillas, drug dealers or right-wing terrorists.

Duarte was popular with the poor and the expressions of popular grief at his murder were clearly genuine. He showed his Christian spirit by not contracting the bodyguards without whom few Colombians issue from their houses or offices.

Yet he was a typical product of the cautious and conservative Catholic Church of Colombia, which retained the hallmarks of an earlier age, when more attention was given to the maintenance of the status quo than to any effective action to right the wrongs of a society which has for centuries been run for the benefit of a small group of rich people.

Duarte appeared to have no qualms about Colombia's recruitment into the US-led "war on drugs", which brought widespread misery to his country, despite the fact that this "war" was proving as futile in reducing the flow of cocaine and heroin as it was costly and dangerous. Nor did he express any worries about Washington's plans for the further militarisation of Colombia.

Born of a poor country family in 1939, Duarte joined the clergy and was early marked out by the hierarchy as promising material, being sent to study at the Gregorian University in Rome before being ordained in the shadow of St Peter's in 1963.

Before he was 50 he was given the newly created see of Apartadó in the far north of Colombia, where the owners of the vast banana plantations of the plain of Urabá had for years been grinding their workforce down in the search for profits. Trade unionists were routinely assassinated and the bloodshed was augmented with the terrorist activities of the left-wing guerrillas of the Army of National Liberation, ELN, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC.

The maelstrom which developed when the two guerrilla groups set about each other was completed with the emergence of the right-wing terrorists of the so-called United Self-Defence of Córdoba and Urabá, ACCU. These terrorists worked hand in glove with the landowners and with the army in a ferocious civil war. Duarte worked closely with Alvaro Uribe Vélez, then governor of the department of Antioquia, who favoured the right-wing terrorists and who went on to establish himself as the leading contender in presidential elections due to be held later this year.

Though Duarte was critical of all forms of violence, he stopped short of embracing the calling of the prophet Isaiah after whom his parents had named him and forebore to condemn the persecution of organised – and unorganised – labour in the new diocese. His actions in Apartadó nevertheless commended him to the Vatican and he was given the even more taxing job of running the archdiocese of Cali, a city noted for the activities of its narcotics merchants who were determined to retain their commercial prosperity with as much violence as was needed.

In 1999 Duarte used the heaviest weapon the Church can mount in a Catholic country, when he moved against members of the ELN who broke into a church during a Mass and took 185 hostages, including the priest. The guerrillas later released most of those hostages, but kept 36 people sequestered in their mountain hideouts, with 16 other hostages captured during the hijacking of an Avianca airliner. Duarte warned that he would excommunicate all ELN members if the rebel leadership did not free all their hostages.

At the same time he maintained relations with the AUC, the umbrella organisation of the right-wing terrorists including ACCU, offering his residence as a venue for talks between senior government figures and the terrorist commander Carlos Castaño. In February he went on record as criticising many candidates in this year's elections, but upset President Andrés Pastrana by not wanting to name them.

Hugh O'Shaughnessy