BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - In a deeply Catholic country where even professional hit men have their own cult of the Virgin Mary, the gunshots that killed Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino resounded more loudly than the usual rain of death that strikes Colombia every day.
Unidentified gunmen shot Duarte Cancino, 63, as he left a church where he had celebrated a wedding in a poor district of Cali on Saturday night. Thousands of people of all social classes, some weeping, continued to file past his glass-covered coffin in the southern city's cathedral on Monday.
"He was holy, a representative of God on earth, he helped the poor and listened to people. The Lord will punish them," said Isabel Lina Caicedo, 65, who had been lining up for two hours under the tropical sun to enter the cathedral.
While Duarte Cancino had criticized all the violent forces at work here, official suspicions focus on cocaine gangs, presumably worried by accusations he made last month that they were funding congressional campaigns.
Many said the archbishop died for speaking the truth -- like Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed in 1980 by suspected right-wing death squads. Others suspect the assassination was intended to further destabilize a country heading for presidential elections on May 26.
In a country wracked by drug trafficking and a 38-year-old war that claims 3,500 lives a year, there are many possible suspects. Drug traffickers, leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries all number hit men among their ranks.
Police hunting for the killers have arrested 500 people.
The Roman Catholic Church is widely seen as an honest broker by all sides in Colombia's conflict.
But despite the respect for the church, and the shock the killing has produced, there is no sign the archbishop's death will alter an already bloody political landscape.
Some 22 Catholic priests and one other bishop have been killed by guerrillas, paramilitaries or drug gangs since 1989.
The country's second-largest Marxist rebel force, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, denied it had anything to do with the killing and praised the church's role in preliminary peace talks now taking place with the government.
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"I would like to express our condolences to the bishops, they have been very close to this whole (peace) process," ELN spokesman Pablo Beltran told local radio on Monday, adding that he thought the murder could be aimed at upsetting talks.
The outlawed paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC, had earlier said rogue ELN elements carried out what they described as a "demented killing."
The church has also been involved in the peace talks with the largest leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The government called off the talks last month after three years, and the FARC has embarked on a sabotage offensive throughout the country.
A senior FARC commander, Pablo Catatumbo, contacted Reuters to deny that his group had assassinated Duarte Cancino.
The ELN killed a bishop in 1989, but it also has deep links to the Roman Catholic Church. For decades it was led by a renegade Spanish priest, Manuel Perez.
Another priest, Camilo Torres, joined the ELN and was killed in his first combat engagement in 1966, earning martyr status among the far-left that endures to this day.
Even the drug trade is pervaded by religious sentiment, and the infamous hit men of the city of Medellin regularly ask the Virgin Mary for protection in their work.
The late cocaine lord Pablo Escobar was persuaded to surrender to the government in 1991 by Father Rafael Garcia Herreros, an aged clergyman famous for one-minute television sermons before the evening news.
Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez described in "News of a Kidnapping" the religious sense of Escobar's hired thugs: "They followed the same Boy Jesus and Virgin Mary as their kidnap victims. They prayed every day to implore their protection and mercy, with a perverse devotion."