Reply #119: More on that REAL peace march yesterday:

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia: Thousands Come Out for Anti-Paramilitary March
Written by Helda Martínez*
Friday, 07 March 2008

Bogota, Colombia (IPS) - "I will march against the members of the security forces who have betrayed the honour of the military and the police, and have betrayed their fatherland, by selling themselves out to paramilitaries and drug traffickers to serve their interests," said Colombian Senator Juan Manuel Galán in a speech given at the spot where his father was assassinated in 1989.

He was addressing hundreds of protesters on their way to take part in Thursday’s demonstration that paid "homage to the victims of paramilitarism, parapolitics and crimes of the state" in more than 20 Colombian cities and another 100 around the world.

The peaceful nationwide demonstration took place without incident. But it basically went unreported by the mainstream media, by contrast with the heavy international coverage of the global Feb. 4 march against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.
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Between 1982 and 2005, nearly four million people were forcibly displaced and lost their land, and at least 15,000 people fell victim to forced disappearance, according to a local human rights group, Justice and Peace.
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The far-right paramilitary militias, which in the 1980s joined the security forces in their fight against the leftist rebel groups that emerged in 1964, have been blamed by the United Nations for the lion’s share of the human rights crimes committed in the armed conflict.
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Of the 15,000 victims of forced disappearance reported between 1982 and 2005, at least 3,000 were buried in common graves, some of which have begun to be exhumed. It is impossible to know how many were thrown into rivers, a common paramilitary practice.

"Disappearance is a monstrous crime," former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus told IPS. "That is why…we started this march at the Magdalena river," he said, after accompanying hundreds of mainly indigenous and black people displaced by the war on the three-day march from Flandes.

"We were inspired by an audiovisual testimony by the artist Clemencia Echeverri, who recently showed, in a sophisticated Bogotá art gallery, a night-time recording taken from the two shores of the Cauca river" in the northwestern province of Antioquia, said Mockus. (Antioquia is a paramilitary stronghold.)

"On the recording, you hear the sound of the water flowing, and above that you hear the screams of peasant farmers and chainsaws running, and you can see people with sticks, fishing pieces of clothing out of the river," he added.

According to testimony from numerous survivors and members of paramilitary groups, the latter frequently used chainsaws to cut their victims up alive.
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"The paramilitaries have perpetrated more than 3,500 massacres and stolen more than six million hectares of land, and since their demobilisation they have killed 600 people a year. They also achieved control over 35 percent of the seats in Congress," said the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), which organised Thursday’s nationwide march.

Guillermo Cano, director of the El Espectador newspaper, was murdered in 1986 after denouncing, in his column, the activities of "paramilitarism and drug trafficking carried out under the complicit silence of the government."

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1170/1/