FARCing politics

Today's anti-FARC march has sparked plenty of discussion in the Colombian media. The rally has been organised as a supposedly anti-political demonstration against the narco-terrorist outfit Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but of course has been hijacked by the Colombian government as a pro-State media blitz.

At first it appears to be a fairly innocuous event which most right-(and left-?)minded people should support. But when you cast your eye over this Colombian site, you realise that by excluding any other forms of violence it becomes somehow complicit in crimes committed by other institutions - especially those of the State-backed renegade mercenary Colombian paramilitaries.

I emailed one of the organisers of the march, asking if the choice of date was significant. The reason I asked was that on February 4th 1992, Venezuela president Hugo Chávez led an unsuccessful coup attempt which ended with the imprisonment of the head-of-state-to-be and his cohorts. Since around 2005 Chávez has celebrated this day as the "Dawn of Hope" when, according to his "Bolivarian" rewriting of history, the Venezuelan people decided to stand up to the corrupt, incompetent and oppressive regime of Carlos Andrés Pérez.
I wondered, with Chávez's recent declaration of shared ideology with the FARC, whether holding an anti-FARC protest on this date was a sly way of undermining his attempts to steal the media limelight with another display of his military prowess.

The organiser responded that it was entirely coincidental and that they only realised a week into January when it was too late to do anything about it.

I'm not convinced. It does seem awfully convenient for Colombian president Uribe to outshine Chávez on a day like today.