Alvaro Gomez Hurtado

Conservative leader Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, twice a presidential candidate and an executive with the newspaper El Siglo, was kidnaped Sunday, and a bodyguard was killed by gunmen who opened fire as Gomez left church, police said. The gunmen escaped in a car they later blew up with a dynamite charge about two miles away, police reported. Radio stations said that Gomez, 69, the son of former President Laureano Gomez, may have been wounded in the abduction.

Virgilio Barco Vargas, candidate of the opposition Liberal Party, won election Sunday as president of Colombia by a wide margin over his conservative and Marxist opponents. With Barco leading by more than 1.3 million votes and more than 80% of the vote counted, Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, the Conservative Party candidate, acknowledged defeat in a televised statement at 9 p.m., five hours after the polls closed. With 5.

The pacification program sponsored by President Belisario Betancur to end guerrilla violence in Colombia has broken down. Armed political violence and banditry continue throughout the country a year after the signing of the cease-fire agreement with the guerrillas that was announced as the start of the peace process. That agreement, negotiated directly by Betancur, called for the insurgents to lay down their arms and offered them an amnesty under the supervision of a national peace commission.

Pablo Escobar, the billionaire cocaine lord who eluded an intense police manhunt for seven years, surrendered to Colombian authorities Wednesday in exchange for a promise of leniency for drug-related crimes and a guarantee against extradition to the United States.