Sitting in his spartan home in Ecuador, Father Colin MacInnes can laugh about it now, but nine nears ago, with the local police force chasing him through his adopted South American homeland, he was lucky to escape with his life.

MacInnes stresses the farcical humour of the incident, but in the volatile atmosphere that prevailed, he was in real danger, with vested interests anxious that the “uppity” Scottish man of God should be out of their hair.

With the poor of the shanty town in which he works holding the police hostage to stop them from arresting their beloved Scottish padre on trumped-up charges of theft and political agitation, MacInnes went on the run.

“The Bishop of Quito and various others came to my house that night and advised it would be very dangerous because the police might come back,” he recalls. “We decided to go to a hiding place in five cars, but the driver of my car got lost and we had to stop a police car and ask directions. It was not without incident!” The US Embassy offered him sanctuary. “The idea behind the arrest warrant was to get me to prison for a day or two and I later found out they had paid someone to kill me off — that’s the way things work here.

“I was kept in a room away from the public gaze, but I felt a burning frustration and anger at the sense of injustice, then a realisation about how much injustice had been perpetrated in Latin America towards innocent people.”

The year was 1996, and MacInnes, from South Uist in the Western Isles, was already a hero to the 80,000 slum-dwellers of Comité del Pueblo. In the previous 11 years, he had brought water, a sewage system, electricity, roads, health care and a bank to a forgotten hillside barrio, or neighbourhood, on the outskirts of the capital, which was mired in almost unimaginable poverty.

The 59-year-old has been compared to Jesus Christ by his adoring parishioners and called a modern-day miracle worker by the press in Ecuador for transforming the ghetto. But, after 20 years, the inspirational priest is moving on to another challenge, and another run-down coastal shanty town. He is 60 this month, a time when many of his contemporaries back home are winding down to retirement, but MacInnes’s energy and zeal are apparent for everybody to see. He is convinced the time is right to leave Comité del Pueblo for a new challenge. “I think the parish and town is now well established. My commitment was to working with poor people, so I am going to work with a poorer community.”

He has only visited the shanty towns of Guayaquil once, but he will try to repeat the remarkable turnaround of Comité del Pueblo when he goes there later this year. “I was horrified by what I saw,” he says. “There are houses on stilts made of bamboo cane and a lot of violence and poverty. I hate to think about it.”

MacInnes’s compassion for the people of Ecuador has earned him admiration in his new homeland, but few are aware of his work back home. He does, however, have some high-profile supporters. The Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow visited MacInnes earlier this year, while in Ecuador to see his daughter, Freya. “What he has achieved in that barrio is absolutely unbelievable,” says Snow. “He has incredible connections and has milked them for all they were worth. You would think after 20 years he would be jaded, but not a bit of it. I think he is the proof that sometimes the church can reach parts that governments can’t.

“He is a liberation theologist, a man of action who gets on with it rather than talking about it. He is one of the most amazing people I have met in the developing world.”

The future Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy served as one of MacInnes’s altar boys as a child, and the priest has been adept at using every contact he had to help his poor parishioners. “Not only does he understand the spiritual needs of parishioners, he champions their material needs also. I have no doubt that he will be as effective in the regeneration of his new parish,” says Kennedy.

MacInnes concedes with a smile that he is seen by the poor as a hero, but adds: “At the end of the day, what does that mean? I am not doing anything very extraordinary. People all over the world are helping each other.”

Born in Bornish, South Uist, to Alan MacInnes, a crofter fisherman, and his wife, Jane, MacInnes had harboured dreams of being a priest since childhood. After training at the now closed Blairs College in Aberdeen, he studied in Valladolid, Spain, before returning to Scotland, where he ministered to the people of St Barr’s in Barra. As a seminarian, he read extensively about the suffering of the poor of Latin America. Fired up by the liberation theology that swept the Catholic Church in the 1960s and 1970s, he pledged to swap the comfort of Scotland one day for the crime-infested barrios of South America.

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