Some 300,000 people in Bogota and other major Colombian cities marched on Thursday in support of the thousands of victims of right-wing paramilitary groups and "state crimes."
The demonstrations aimed at drawing attention to the "4 million people displaced, 15,000 missing and 3,000 buried in common graves" in more than 20 years of violence by paramilitary and government forces, the organizers said.
The marches coincided with Colombia's diplomatic crisis with Ecuador and Venezuela over a Colombian military attack at the weekend on a leftist rebel camp inside Ecuador. In particular, the organizers said the marches were an expression of "the Colombian people's solidarity with 1,700 Indians, 2,550 union members and 5,000 communist party members killed in the past decades."
One of the banners in the Bogota march read: "No more paramilitaries, no more massacres, no more impunity."
Many others bore blowup photographs of people killed or missing in the violence.
In the city, where some 200,000 people demonstrated, some 1,500 riot police took to the streets and had to step in to confront a group of masked individuals throwing stones and home-made bombs at them.
Two people were injured in the melee and 24 people were arrested, police said.
Colombia's paramilitary groups, which were organized in the 1980s ostensibly to protect landholders from leftist guerrillas extorting "war taxes," have been accused of drug trafficking and killing rebel sympathizers. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a group uniting several paramilitary outfits, have been active in the north and east of the country for about 20 years. Colombia and several other countries consider the AUC a terrorist organization.
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