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BOGOTA, Mar 7 (OneWorld) - Amid the escalating diplomatic crisis with Venezuela, Ecuador, and now Nicaragua, tens of thousands of Colombians marched yesterday in solidarity with the victims of their country's violent conflict. They were joined by demonstrators in capital cities across the continent, as well as Paris and New York.

© Henry ManceThe marches were organized to call attention to crimes committed by Colombia's government and the country's paramilitary groups, which are in the process of demobilizing following a 2003 agreement with the government.

Mass marches one month ago mobilized up to 2 million Colombians in protest against the FARC guerrilla group, which has been leading violent attacks in the country for decades. Organizers of Thursday's march said that this exclusive focus on the FARC had overlooked the complexity of violence in Colombia, and more attention should be focused on all parties responsible for killings and displacement.

"The international community has to understand that the FARC aren't the only armed actor here," said Diana Garcia, a student who participated in the march in the capital city Bogota. "Despite the demobilization process, the paramilitaries are rearming and their victims haven't received justice."

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.

"People have given an example of peace and above all of coexistence and tolerance." -Bogota Mayor Samuel Moreno

The FARC have gained international notoriety for hostage-taking and are currently known to hold more than 700 people, including the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. While the crimes committed by the paramilitaries have received less publicity, they often exceeded the guerrillas' brutality in their number and nature.

Over 120,000 violent deaths since 1982 have been attributed to paramilitary forces by Colombia's prosecutor-general's office. Recent testimonies made as part of the trial process by demobilized paramilitary leaders described how venomous snakes had been used to kill victims, in attempts to feign natural causes.

In many cases, the paramilitaries' crimes had economic purposes: according to the National Movement of Victims of State Crime, the groups illegally appropriated at least 23,000 square miles of land -- about the size of the U.S. state of West Virginia -- forcibly displacing thousands of poor Colombians in rural areas.

Despite such figures, a survey by the news magazine Semana last year showed that 47 percent of Colombians felt that the FARC held the greatest responsibility for Colombia's violence, with only 5 percent blaming the paramilitaries the most. One third of respondents said that the paramilitaries were necessary to fight the FARC and other guerrilla groups.

"The problem is that the media give more information about one side [the guerrillas] than the other [the paramilitaries]," said one marcher, a displaced woman from the southern province of Meta whose daughter was killed by paramilitary groups. "The paramilitaries don't kidnap people like the FARC: they kill them straight away and cut up their bodies."

Controversially, the marches also aimed to raise awareness about the abuses by state forces in Colombia, including the army's bloody siege of the Palace of Justice in 1985 and several cases judged by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

© Henry Mance"People stigmatize victims of the paramilitaries and of the State, saying that they must be sympathizers of the FARC," said Jose Luis Palacios, a student demonstrator. "This is one of the things we wanted to say today: being a victim of the paramilitaries or of the state doesn't mean that they are pro-FARC, just pro-peace."

In creative attempts to break through the lack of public recognition, demonstrators performed street theater and other art, including a display of cow bones on black cloth to represent massacre victims.

While the turnout for the marches exceeded observers' expectations, it was notably lower than that of February's anti-FARC marches. The Colombian government opposed the march, with Jose Obdulio Gaviria, a key advisor to President Uribe, claiming that the FARC influenced its organization. Partly as a result, many marchers expressed strong anti-government sentiments with slogans accusing Uribe of links to paramilitary groups.

Among the politicians who did support the march was the mayor of Bogota, Samuel Moreno. "People have given an example of peace and above all of coexistence and tolerance," the mayor commented.

© Henry ManceThe organizers hope that the marches will provide a basis for greater social sensitivity to the plight of victims and strengthen their calls for truth and reparations.

However, the marches' impact risks being undermined by the diplomatic dispute between Colombia and its neighbors, sparked by a military operation last Saturday that killed a FARC leader located 1 mile into Ecuadorian territory.

Ecuador's president Rafael Correa and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez have vociferously criticized the attack as a violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty, while the Colombian government has responded by alleging that those governments had been providing covert assistance to the guerrillas.

Nicaragua's president also announced Thursday that it was breaking off diplomatic ties with Colombia, in solidarity with Ecuador.

Chavez's attitude has angered many in Colombia and may now generate a further series of protest marches. A Facebook group organizing anti-Chavez rallies on Apr. 11 had garnered over 40,000 members across the world by Thursday evening.

OneWorld TV: Colombia's Hidden Tragedy

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