ICTJ in the News

March 6, 2008

Colombian anti-paramilitary march shows divisions

Reuters

By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA, March 6 (Reuters) - Thousands of Colombians marched on Thursday against right-wing militias that carried out massacres as part of a dirty war against Marxist rebels, highlighting sharp divisions in the country as it faces a regional diplomatic crisis.

A far larger march was held a month earlier against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a rebel group widely despised for using kidnapping and assassination as tactics in its four-decade-old insurrection.

Thursday's rally came amid a diplomatic crisis in which the left-wing governments of Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua cut diplomatic ties with Colombia over a weekend raid in which Colombian forces entered Ecuador to kill a FARC commander.

President Alvaro Uribe is under pressure to say he will never again allow troops to enter foreign soil in pursuit of the guerrillas. But the conservative Colombian leader demands that neighboring countries crack down on rebels using their border areas as safe havens.

The left-right rift could be felt on the streets on Thursday as victims of paramilitary violence marched with photographs of murdered and missing loved ones.

The contrasting marches showed that Colombia is still not ready to condemn all violence with one voice, said Mauricio Romero, analyst for the International Center for Transitional Justice.

"We had to have one against the guerrillas last month and then another today against the far right," he said.

"The left has only begun to clearly reject the FARC and the right is just starting to condemn paramilitarism," he said. "We have a long way to go before Colombia can raise a unified voice against all political violence."

The opposition accused the government of using February's anti-FARC rally to promote a measure pending in Congress aimed at allowing Uribe to run for an unprecedented third term.

Thursday's march challenged him to acknowledge human rights abuses by the army and by paramilitaries guilty of many of the worst massacres of the war, sometimes carried out in collusion with rogue members of state security forces.

Dozens of Uribe's closest congressional allies are being investigated for their dealings with the "paras", who were formed as private security forces in the 1980s to protect rich Colombians from FARC kidnappings and land grabs.

More than 30,000 paramilitaries have demobilized over the last four years in a peace deal promising reduced jail terms. (Reporting by Hugh Bronstein; editing by Stuart Grudgings)