{"id":96911,"date":"2016-05-22T09:04:23","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=96911"},"modified":"2016-05-22T09:04:23","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:04:23","slug":"rene-and-juan-carlos-set-out-to-convert-their-colombian-megachurch-to-orthodox-judaism-this-is-what-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=96911","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Ren\u00e9 and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened.&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/story.californiasunday.com\/colombian-church-orthodox-judaism\">Essay<\/a>: With its decaying two-story homes and grazing cows, Bello looks like just another sleepy suburb of Medell\u00edn, Colombia. Thirty years ago, though, it was known as la capital de los sicarios, the capital of the assassins. Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medell\u00edn cartel, which supplied most of the world\u2019s cocaine, recruited many of his sicarios from Bello, paying them to eliminate his adversaries. Mostly teenagers, they rode motorcycles, prayed to La Virgen Mar\u00eda Auxiliadora, and killed their victims in the streets. Ren\u00e9 Cano grew up in Bello at the height of Escobar\u2019s reign.<br \/>\nBorn in 1978, Ren\u00e9 was the child of a textile factory worker and a housewife, both observant Catholics. At 13, he was so tall and self-possessed that he passed for an 18-year-old and, by his own description, was sexually precocious. He could talk anyone into anything. When his father announced one evening there was no money, nothing for dinner, Ren\u00e9 ran outside with a chair and came back with cash.<br \/>\nHis cousins were sicarios and so were his neighbors; almost everyone he knew was on drugs. His mother understood it was only a matter of time before Ren\u00e9 would join them, and she feared for his life. \u201cDon\u2019t hang out on the corner,\u201d she told him one day, \u201cbecause they will come.\u201d Five minutes after she called him into the house, men gunned down seven boys on the spot where he had been standing. The stench of their deaths lingered for weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Essay: With its decaying two-story homes and grazing cows, Bello looks like just another sleepy suburb of Medell\u00edn, Colombia. Thirty years ago, though, it was known as la capital de los sicarios, the capital of the assassins. Pablo Escobar, the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=96911\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96912,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96911\/revisions\/96912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}