document: With a third presidential candidate assassinated , Colombia 's government refused Friday to put off next month 's election and vowed to keep up the fight against drug traffickers . A telefaxed communique , purportedly from the Medellin drug cartel , denied responsibility Friday for the assassination of presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro , who died in a hail of bullets Thursday aboard a Colombian jetliner carrying 97 people . But on Thursday , within hours of Pizarro 's assassination , a man had called the national radio network station Caracol and related in detail how the cartel had allegedly ordered the former guerrilla 's killing . The authenticity of neither claim could be verified . That is not the first time there have been contradictory communiques , verbal and faxed , claiming and and then denying responsibility for assassinations and terrorist acts . Friday 's telefax accused police of instigating violence in order to force the government to continue its crackdown on traffickers , and accused the police of putting out false communiques purported to be from the cartel . The August assassination of another candidate , Sen. Luis Carlos Galan of the governing Liberal Party , prompted the government to launch a U.S.-backed crackdown on Colombia 's cocaine cartels . Since then , drug traffickers have killed more than 230 people , including judges , politicians , policemen , soldiers , newspaper employees and two other presidential candidates . Leaders of the leftist Patriotic Union Party , whose candidate was slain last month , urged the government to cancel the May 27 vote . But Interior Minister Horacio Serpa told reporters Friday that the elections will not be postponed or canceled . In a televised speech late Thursday , Serpa said the government will fight terrorists `` without rest . '' On Friday , thousands of men , women and children filed past Pizarro 's coffin , displayed in an open patio in the Congress building . Supporters of Pizarro 's M-19 movement burned buses and threw rocks at police in clashes in several cities . Hundreds of leftist guerrillas belonging to the M-19 rebel group laid down their arms last month and formed a political party with Pizarro as its presidential candidate . Government officials had said Pizarro could have helped mediate peace agreements with other leftist insurgents . Governing party candidate Cesar Gaviria , the presidential front-runner , suspended campaign activities following the Pizarro killing . In a radio interview , he condemned the killing as another act by `` powerful organizations '' trying to impose an `` empire of evil and crime . '' The other candidates are Alvaro Gomez Hurtado and Rodrigo Lloreda , both of the Conservative Party . Gomez , suggesting that Barco does not have the confidence of Colombia 's military , urged the president Friday to name a three-man council to run Colombia 's security forces . He said such a move would help ensure peace in the last month of the presidential campaign . Barco , through a spokesman , rejected the proposal . The Patriotic Union 's presidential candidate , Bernardo Jaramillo , was fatally wounded March 22 at the Bogota airport by an assassin with a machine gun . Pizarro 's killer , 25-year-old Alvaro Rodriguez , was sitting two rows behind Pizarro on the flight and apparently retrieved the machine gun from an airplane bathroom before returning to his seat , Capt. Fabio Munevar told Caracol . Minutes later , he stood up , pulled the weapon from his black leather jacket , leaned forward and fired at Pizarro 's head from about a foot away , Munevar said . Pizarro 's bodyguards immediately killed the assassin . The plane , en route to the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla , returned immediately to Bogota . Pizarro died about an hour later at a hospital . The Bogota morgue said he was struck by 13 bullets . Two men with machine guns were arrested at Barranquilla airport , a police spokesman there said . They apparently were part of an assassination squad with orders to kill Pizarro if he survived the flight , police said . In another development , church officials in Medellin said they had foiled a plan to kill Colombia 's Roman Catholic prelate , Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo . The city 's Catholic church said it discovered the plan to kill Lopez Trujillo after intercepting messages on a radio frequency used by the men plotting the crime . Three men disguised as police agents entered Lopez Trujillo 's offices on Wednesday and Thursday asking for the prelate , but he was not in , said the church statement late Thursday . Lopez is archbishop of Medellin , the country 's second-largest city , and chairman of Colombia 's Bishops Conference .
extractive_keyphrases: assassinations drug traffickers medellin drug cartel presidential candidate carlos pizarro terrorist acts cocaine cartels colombia election
abstractive_keyphrases: pizarro's assassination