Prominent Bolivian Evangelist Murdered

Prominent charismatic Bolivian evangelist Julio Cesar Ruibal was murdered by gunmen in Cali, Colombia, December 13 as he left a meeting of Protestant pastors. His death has caused profound shock throughout the Latin American evangelical community.

Ruibal, 42, was shot at 3:15 p.m. as he left a meeting of evangelical pastors in Cali. Officials said Ruibal was killed by sicarios, or professional assassins, with suspected links to drug traffickers. According to family friend Alberto Salcedo, pastor of the 6,000-member Ekklesia evangelical church in La Paz, Bolivia, Ruibal received death threats days before his murder.

“He was intercepted by a motorcyclist who warned him that he was going to die within a month,” Salcedo said. “It looks like they kept their word.”

Zacarias Salas, former head of the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia, said that Ruibal “had been receiving threats from persons who disliked his [evangelistic] work.”

According to Salas, Ruibal “was ambushed by two gunmen as he left the meeting and shot three times, twice in the head.”

The murderers took advantage of the absence of two bodyguards who had recently been assigned to Ruibal. The bodyguards were themselves ex-assassins who had become members of Ruibal’s church following their conversions to Christianity, Salas said.

Church leaders and police suspect that members of the Cali drug cartel ordered the murder. Narcotics traffickers had tried to purchase real estate in the city that belonged to Ruibal’s evangelistic association, sources said.

Since moving to Colombia from Bolivia in 1977, Ruibal had founded the Christian Center in Cali and opened a health clinic there. His organization planned to build a radio and television broadcasting complex on the property.

“Julio fought his final battle,” Salas told 2,000 mourners who gathered at a memorial service in La Paz. “He left behind trained people there in Cali who will continue with the work.”

KUHLMAN INFLUENCE: Born in Sucre and raised by his grandmother after his parents’ separation, Ruibal converted to Christianity while he was in the United States where he had gone to study medicine. He received discipleship training under the late Kathryn Kuhlman, a charismatic who led a worldwide healing ministry.

Ruibal returned to Bolivia in 1972, at the age of 17.

A spontaneous revival broke out in home meetings that Ruibal organized, and within weeks, he was preaching to packed crowds in the La Paz soccer stadium. At age 22, he founded the Neo-Pentecostal Movement in Bolivia, and he held healing services in outdoor stadiums.

Ruibal’s ministry so impressed then-President Hugo Banzer Suarez that he loaned the young evangelist his presidential jet to travel to meetings in other parts of the country.

“The present generation of Christian leaders, those of us between 40 and 45 years of age, were born under Ruibal’s ministry,” said Salcedo, who became a Christian in one of Ruibal’s home meetings and whose congregation started as a result of the 1972 revival. Several members of the evangelical leadership in Bolivia had been members of motorcycle gangs when the revival changed their lives.

John Stanko, executive director of the Julio Ruibal Foundation in Mobile, Alabama, said the evangelist was “on the cutting edge” of confronting Colombian society. “He was always fearless and just had a boldness that was both refreshing and irritating to different people, depending on where they were coming from,” Stanko said.

Stanko asserted that Ruibal’s death will have a wide impact. “So many assassinations in Colombia have been political figures, but not spiritual figures,” he said. “I believe Julio’s death will highlight the spiritual nature of the war going on in Colombia and will bring home the seriousness of it.”

Ruibal is survived by his wife, Ruth, and two daughters, Abigail and Sarai.