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Rice is a staple served with most Colombian meals, but over a steak lunch at a sidewalk café, Juan Carlos Villegas didn't eat a bite of the fluffy white mound on his plate while he told his story.

Villegas, 28, was leaving a Sunday afternoon church retreat in his pickup truck on April 28, 2002. As assistant pastor at Family Christian Church in the hardscrabble Medellín suburb of Bello, he had just helped baptize 50 people in a stream running through a parishioner's ranch in Barbosa, a village 24 miles from Bello.

A few yards down the road from the ranch, guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) took Villegas hostage and demanded his church pay $25,000 for his safe return. He joined the ranks of perhaps dozens of Christian clergy that rebel groups have held for ransom or for political reasons in Colombia's four-decade-long civil war.

During his 12-day captivity, Villegas marched over mountains eight hours a day with the guerrillas, often soaked by driving rain, wearing the same clothes he wore at the baptism. He endured biting cold. He never knew where they were going or when his ordeal would end.

And he ate the only thing available to the guerrillas: "Rice, rice, rice," Villegas said.

Colombia is kidnap capital of the world, with more than 3,000 abductions in 2001. More than 600 were snatched in the department (state) of Antioquia and its capital, Medellín. Kidnappings fund insurgents' fight against the government and help them achieve political gain. A few hostages have been released through negotiations without ransom payment. Many more are released after paying ransom. Others are killed or die in captivity.

More than a year after Villegas was released, he is still rebuilding his life. The ordeal has left scars.

For the 12 days that the ELN held him, the rebels constantly told Villegas that if they ran into army soldiers or paramilitaries, the first one killed would be him. The rebels' machine guns were often trained on him, emphasizing their willingness to make good on the promise. After church members picked him up from the side of a road where the guerrillas arranged to leave him, he sobbed during the entire four-hour journey back to Bello.

Most unnerving to Villegas was learning from Colombia's special kidnapping investigation force, the Gaula, that his kidnapping had not been random. Guerrillas infiltrated the church and knew he would be at the baptism. They were waiting. Had they not abducted him at the ranch, they would have gotten him elsewhere.

Why?

"The general concept of a Christian pastor is of somebody who is an opportunist," Villegas said. Some people perceive that ministers live well—at other peoples' expense. Because a few pastors do accumulate wealth and maintain a showy appearance, a stigma carries to all of them, he said. "Here it's not an honor to be a pastor."

At his captors' request, Villegas read to them for hours from the Psalms and other books of the Bible. He read them the entire Gospel of Mark. He led four of his captors in prayer to receive Christ. He believes two of those guerrillas made sincere professions of faith.

Many expressed desires to leave the guerrilla ranks, which they joined because it offered poor young men and women a salary, a cause, and a hope for the future.

At least 3,000 fighters from Colombia's illegal armed groups have taken part in the government's "reinsertion" program to return them to civilian society. Villegas wonders about the spiritual seeds he planted among his captors, and what happened to the ones he led to the Lord.

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February (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48