ARCHBISHOP ISAÍAS DUARTE CANCINO: Isaías Duarte Cancino, who was murdered on March 16th aged 63, was Archbishop of Cali, in Colombia.
He was shot as he left the Church of the Good Shepherd in Aguablanca, a working-class neighbourhood of the city where he had been archbishop since 1995. He had been conducting a mass wedding ceremony for more than a 100 couples.
Although the Catholic Church Hierarchy in Colombia has often preferred to try to stay out of political affairs, Archbishop Duarte was outspoken in his criticism of the continuing violence. He attacked both rebel groups - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) - for kidnapping innocent people.
"A rebel who kidnaps and kills, eliminates entire populations, and mocks the whole process of peace, lacks the virtues proper to a human being and becomes the most miserable of men," he wrote in 2000.
"We ask God that the guerrilla fighters in Colombia may feel deep sorrow in their souls for the evil they commit when they kill an innocent, defenceless brother or sister, that they may understand that theirs is not a just war, but merely a repeating of savage acts of the saddest times of human history."
After the ELN kidnapped the entire congregation of a Cali church in 1999, he publicly excommunicated all its members. He also criticised the efforts of President Pastrana to reach a peace agreement with the rebels, insisting that the rebels must first lay down their arms.
He also spoke out against the paramilitary groups pitted against the rebels, and was most recently in the headlines when he suggested that money from drug trafficking was going into the campaigns of several candidates for recent congressional elections.
Isaías Duarte was born on February 15th, 1939, in San Gil in the province of Santander. He attended secondary school in the nearby city of Bucaramanga before going to a seminary in Pamplona, Spain, and on to study theology in Rome.
He returned to his home city of Bucaramanga after graduation and devoted his life to the church in Colombia from then on. He was a parish priest until 1985, when he was appointed Bishop of Germania de Numidia, and three years later became the first incumbent bishop of the newly-created diocese of Apartadío in the far north of the province of Antioquia .
Isaías Duarte Cancino: born 1939; died, March 2002