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BOGOTA, Feb 5 (OneWorld) - An estimated 2 million Colombians marched here Monday in a show of opposition to the FARC guerrillas. Worldwide, solidarity protests organized through the Facebook online platform spanned 193 cities in Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia.

© Henry ManceThe march -- the biggest in Colombian history -- has been interpreted as showing both the possibilities and the limitations of Facebook-driven activism.

The anti-FARC march was first envisaged by Carlos Andres Santiago, a Facebook user from Bucaramanga in northern Colombia. He joined with three other members of the networking site's "One Million Voices against the FARC" group, from Colombia and the United States, to organize the worldwide march.

"Not even Barack Obama's or Hillary Clinton's call to action have had a response like this one against the FARC," said Alberto Pardo, an Internet expert.

The anti-FARC Facebook group currently has nearly 270,000 members.

Once the popularity of the anti-FARC group became clear, the march was actively promoted by mainstream media outlets, most actively Colombia's only national daily newspaper, El Tiempo.

Many companies not only allowed their employees to join the lunchtime march, but also issued branded T-shirts and balloons.

That support allowed the march to reach beyond Colombia's 647,840 Facebook users to mobilize a wider audience.

"This was a snowball that kept growing and growing," said Santiago, a pharmacy student. "A few years ago no one would say anything against the FARC. In the march, we've shown our faces and we're working for a new country."

"If marching produces greater consciousness of the grave situation in which Colombians are living, it's worthwhile." - Luis Evelis Andrade, Colombia's National Indigenous Organization

Colombia's guerrilla movements, including the FARC, were founded in the 1960s under the inspiration of the Soviet Union and the Cuban Revolution. Their activities of kidnapping and extortion led wealthy landowners to form paramilitary groups in retaliation, often with the support of the armed forces.

Both guerrillas and paramilitaries have been accused of civilian massacres, political intimidation, and other human rights violations.

Colombia's conflict has worsened significantly since the 1980s, when both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries started to draw funding from the drugs trade.

The government of President Alvaro Uribe signed a peace deal with the paramilitaries in 2003, but their reluctance to admit to many massacres and disappearances and the emergence of new paramilitary groups have cast a pall over that agreement. There has been little progress in negotiations with the country's largest illegal group, the FARC, since the collapse of a peace process in 2001.

Many of Monday's marchers attributed the protest's success to the clarity of the organizers' message.

Fernando Nieto, who produced an anti-FARC banner for the event, compared the efforts of Santiago and the other organizers favorably to previous attempts. "I received a Facebook invite for a different march on December 16, but the message was so vague," Nieto said. "The organizers of that event were saying they wanted peace, but they weren't pointing out who was responsible for the violence. So I didn't go. With this invite, it was so clear that I sent it to all my friends."

However, this clarity was seen as over-simplification by many other Facebook users, including those who created a rival group entitled "A million voices against the paramilitaries."

Chain e-mails giving reasons not to participate in the march also emerged. The executive committee of Colombia's left-wing coalition, the Democratic Pole, voted overwhelmingly against participating in the march, on the basis that it had been manipulated into support for the country's hardline President Uribe.

The divergence reached such a level that in Colombia's second largest city, Medellin, the mayor urged marchers not to wear T-shirts bearing printed messages for fear they might provoke violence.

The debate between online users largely excluded rural areas, where Colombia's conflict is most evident but where Internet access is limited.

"People in the cities don't understand the magnitude of the problem," said Luis Evelis Andrade, president of Colombia's National Indigenous Organization (ONIC). "They think that the problem is just about one actor, the FARC. Yet in the countryside we're victims not just of the guerrillas, but of the paramilitaries and the army too. We must condemn crimes whoever commits them."

Andrade accused the mainstream media of shortcomings in its approach to the conflict. "The media should be more serious. They should make the reality known -- that in Colombia there's a long-term conflict, which the government continues to deny," he said.

© Henry ManceThe marches are not expected to lead to a noticeable shift in opinion by the FARC guerrillas, who hold an estimated 700 hostages and who have demanded a large demilitarized zone to discuss their release in exchange for guerrillas currently in government prisons.

The guerrillas announced this weekend that they will soon release three hostages suffering from severe ill-health, following the liberation of two female captives in January.

However, the marches do mark a significant step in a country where people's fear of violent retribution has historically deterred political protest.

According to Nieto, "The aim was to bring together a mass audience with an overwhelming message rejecting the FARC. And that's the most that civil society can do peacefully at the moment."

ONIC's Andrade agreed, saying, "If marching produces greater consciousness of the grave situation in which Colombians are living, it's worthwhile."

Online organization of the protests enabled the participation of Colombians living abroad, an estimated 5 million people or 10 percent of the total Colombian population. The largest overseas demonstrations were held in Washington, D.C. and London, which both saw around 3,000 Colombians in attendance.

However, the country with most Colombian emigrees -- neighboring Venezuela -- saw only muted protests, in part due to the continuing diplomatic stand-off between its president Hugo Chavez and Colombia's President Uribe over Chavez's aborted role in mediating the hostage exchange.

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