Hostage Takers Excommunicated

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Cali, Colombia, has excommunicated the members of a Marxist guerrilla group responsible for the abduction of 143 churchgoers. The National Liberation Army, or ELN, ignored a June 30 deadline set by the church to free the remaining 36 hostages seized at gunpoint while attending Mass on May 30 in a suburb of Cali. The abduction was condemned by Pope John Paul II as sacrilegious and by outraged Colombians who are accustomed to kidnappings as a product of the nation’s civil war. The stigma of excommunication is taken seriously in Colombia, whose 40 million inhabitants are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. ELN’s supreme commander, Nicolas Rodriguez, admitted in June that the threat of excommunication deeply worried many of his fighters.