The poster above says, "they also marched and they thought that they were doing it for their Country and they didn't know that they were supporting the sinister horror of fascism. I won't march on February 4th."
This poster was made in counter-protest to a multi-country demonstration organized by the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe against the FARC. (Being Colombian) I got e-mails from several Colombians urging me to join this absurd event in New York, outside the United Nations on the February 4th. The thoughts running through my head were, "An international protest against a terrorist group that carries out its terrorism only in Colombia? What are people in Switzerland gonna do about the FARC, who kidnap and harass the Colombian gentry? What the fuck do they hope to achieve, anyway? The Swiss really taking a stand against terrorism in Colombia? Or are Colombians just engaged in the national pass time of keeping up appearances–Believe us we hate terrorists!–except on an international scale?" The protest was not openly announced as being organized by the Colombian government and and it all seemed so poorly conceived and illogical that in retrospect, I should have known.
So many days after all these questions ran through my head, my cousin sent me this article from the Colombian indymedia site. Since it's in Spanish and there was no English counterpart on the American indymedia site, I'll give you a run down of what the article is about. As it turns out, a few counter-protesters did show up at the anti-FARC rally in New York and were basically attacked and called terrorists by the Uribe-organized gathering.
A very tiny bit of background (because to give the full story would be to recount a fifty year civil war in Colombia) of what has sparked this recent public relations campaign by the Colombian government: recently, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez agreed to negotiate the release of few FARC kidnapped journalists and politicians. The negotiations were apparently successful as two hostages were let go, but then Uribe inexplicably pulled out of the negotiations. Colombia is one of the few Latin American countries that fully backs the U.S. foreign policy and is receiving tidy sums of money to keep up the war on drugs. The U.S. has been leaning heavily on Latin American presidencies to not support or form any alliances with the socialist government of Chavez. So it comes as no surprise that just as progress is being made in the release of these hostages, Uribe would punk out of the negotiations. This way, Uribe can keep the money coming in from the U.S. for the war on drugs, the money coming in from narcotrafficking, and the military support of the right wing paramilitaries (the sworn enemies of the left wing FARC). The February 4th protests were simply a way of keeping up appearances without having to actually do the work to achieve peace in Colombia.
