Via the BBC: Colombians in huge Farc protest
Hundreds of thousands of Colombians have poured onto the streets of Bogota to protest against Marxist Farc rebels.
The protesters waved flags and wore T-shirts with the slogan: “No more kidnapping, no more lies, no more deaths, no more Farc.”
Some estimates put the number of people protesting in Bogota at between 500,000 and two million
.
Thousands more protested elsewhere in Colombia, and in close to 100 other cities around the world.
While I have argued that the government of Colombia has to negotiate with the FARC, there is also no doubt that the FARC has precious little moral capital to spend with the Colombian population. However, the FARC have no monopoly on reprehensible behavior,1
which makes the situation a bit more muddled than many would like it to be.
For example, the opposition party, the Alternative Democratic Pole, notes (via the Miami Herald):
Uribe opponents have complained that the conservative president has said little about the estimated 550 persons held hostage by right-wing paramilitaries. But even Carlos Gaviria, president of the opposition Alternative Democratic Pole, a left-of-center coalition, turned up at the Plaza Bolivar in downtown Bogotá, where the marches ended.
Interestingly, the protests were organized, in part, via Facebook. the CSM reports: Facebook used to target Colombia’s FARC with global rally.
- By this I mean that the government has engaged in its own actions of similar criminality, as have many private citizens in Colombia who decry the guerrillas. As such, there isn’t just actor who has engaged in injustice, which makes the entire situation far more complicated than simply blaming the FARC, even though they desrve much blame. [↩]