Twin calamities befell Colombia on Saturday, with the assassination of the Catholic Archbishop of Cali just hours before a massive power failure plunged a huge swathe of the country into darkness at 11.30 p.m.
The industrial centres of Bogota and Cali were without electricity yesterday after two power generators failed in the eastern section of the capital.
Officials, who said the power failure was caused by a surge in consumer demand, were quick to reassure Colombians that the failure was not the result of sabotage or rebel attack. "It's the result of a technical malfunction," said the Mayor of Bogota, Mr Antanas Mockus.
The reassurance was necessary given recent threats by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) - Latin America's most powerful rebel movement - to step up attacks on the country's infrastructure.
FARC assaults on bridges, power pylons and telecommunications towers have increased dramatically since three years of peace talks with the government ended on February 20th.
So far the battle with the FARC has been restricted almost exclusively to the countryside, where 20 per cent of the population live.
Experts said the rebels would now likely launch commando-type operations against high-profile city targets.
The next phase of the fight between the FARC and the Colombian state "will be economic war . . . based on large-scale sabotage of energy, road and communications infrastructure", said Mr Alfredo Rangel, an analyst on military affairs.
The FARC has to "prove that they cannot be militarily defeated, and that sooner or later the state will have to negotiate with them again - and the longer this takes the more expensive the gamble to defeat them becomes," he said.
Meanwhile, Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino, a tough critic of both drug lords and guerrillas, was shot dead on Saturday while travelling with a priest and his driver after celebrating Mass.
The 63-year-old archbishop was killed by gunmen, who approached the vehicle and shot him six times. He was rushed to a Cali clinic, where he was pronounced dead at 9 p.m.
Archbishop Duarte said last month drug money was funding congressional campaigns. The archbishop refused to name the aspiring congress members whose campaigns he believed were funded by narcotics smugglers, saying their identities were widely known in the community.
Archbishop Duarte had also publicly criticised left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary outlaws involved in Colombia's 38-year-old war - which claims about 3,500 mainly civilian lives a year.
The police blamed Marxist guerrillas for the killing: "We believe this was the work of the subversives, but we never had first-hand information that he had received threats."
The head of Colombia's Catholic Church, Monsignor Alberto Giraldo, was not sure. "The question is: What's going on? Who are the dark forces which are trying to destabilise this poor country?" he asked on local radio.
The government has been at war with the FARC for the past four decades and also is battling the smaller National Liberation Army, and right-wing paramilitaries in the Self-Defence units of Colombia.