LAM
News Service - 22 August 2002
Posted on RELIGIOSCOPE 22 August 2002
New
reported threats against Americans in Colombia are once again
causing U.S. missionaries to be careful about their movements.
In
addition, spillover of the over 40-year-old rebel conflict
into neighboring countries is also affecting missionary work
there.
U.S.
embassy officials said they were investigating a reported
order from a rebel commander to attack U.S. citizens in Colombia.
The
threats were reported to have come from intercepted two-way
radio conversations between rebel groups.
The
new threats followed a warning issued by the U.S. embassy
in Bogotá last March that evangelical missionaries
in rural Colombia might be the targets of guerrilla attacks.
A
transcript of the most recent threat reads: “We must
find where the gringos are, because they have all declared
war on us.”
Police
authorities identified the voice as that of Jorge Briceno,
a high-ranking military commander with the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC).
“This
is a renewal of Briceno’s threats of two years ago,” said veteran LAM missionary Nick Woodbury who served in Colombia
for many years and now lives in Miami. “He opposes
U.S. citizens because the United States gives money to Colombia.
He has threatened North Americans before.”
“Alleged
threats against U.S. citizens are constant but they hardly
are confirmed and thankfully seldom take place,”
reported LAM-Canada missionary Alvin Góngora who lives
in Bogotá.
However,
Góngora reported that, “the increasing and
unnecessary involvement of the U.S. government in Colombian
affairs is a contributing factor.”
Góngora
said that while some missionaries have left the country because
of increasing violence and threats, many still remain. “Christian
student organizations and the churches that are closely involved
in several human rights projects still receive personnel,
visitors and short-termers from the U.S.”
Góngora
reminded that Colombians are in far greater, daily danger
than North Americans. “While we worry about the security
of our U.S. sisters and brothers that serve God in Colombia,
and pray for them, Colombians are the ones who are being singled
out, targeted, harassed and killed,” he said.
Meanwhile,
missionary work in neighboring countries is also affected
by the spillover of violence into Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil.
Over 100 people have been killed in the past few months in
the Ecuadorian town of Lago Agrio, twelve miles from the river
that separates the two nations. Officials said that FARC guerrillas
have a list of 300 additional people targeted for assassination.
Guerrillas
use Ecuadorian territory for staging and recuperation as government
troops have pushed into their southern-Colombian stronghold.
“Our
missionaries in Ibarra maintain that things have gotten ‘rougher’ over the last year or so,” reported Dan Batchelor,
a missionary with the Southern Baptist International Mission
Board. Ibarra is a province of Ecuador located near the Colombian
border. “There are lots of rapid kidnappings and the
sort. Locals say that it is the guerrillas,” Batchelor
said.
Along
Ecuador’s coast near the city of Esmeraldas, Batchelor
reported that missionaries have had to take caution.
“In
our work with the Chachi Indians on the Cayapa River we have
been hampered,” he said. “We have had to
curtail trips up the Cayapa River into the jungle where the
Chachi live. Our Missionaries were going up to the river to
different villages when the villagers told them they shouldn’t
be coming due to guerrilla activity.”
Batchelor
said that his mission “cautions our people, if they
do venture into these areas, to maintain a low profile and
to work with locals who will in turn do the most visible work.”
Other
missions have advised missionaries to curtail travel to the
border areas. “HCJB has informed us all that if we
have plans to travel north of the Pichincha province we have
to notify our supervisors and the Personnel Department,”
said missionary Jorge Zambrano. Pichincha province is several
hours by car south of the border and the location of the country’s
capital, Quito. “The message we are receiving is to
not go or plan to deal with it at your own risk,” Zambrano said.
An
HCJB missionary was among those assaulted along an Ecuadorian
highway near the border with Colombia last February by a group
of armed men suspected of being Colombian guerrillas.
Sheila
Leech, director of the ministry's Community Development Department,
was returning from a brief trip to the San Lorenzo Clinic
on Ecuador's northern coast when the incident occurred. Eight
men, most of them masked, used a tractor-trailer to block
the road and proceeded to assault and rob five large inter-provincial
buses as well as a number of private vehicles.
There
were conflicting reports about whether the robbers were rebel
fighters from Colombia or just common criminals. Military
authorities downplayed a guerrilla link, but local newspapers
reported resident’s belief that the attackers were members
of FARC.
