Americas

A mobilization against the terrorist organization Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, FARC, will take place on 4 February 2008. It will happen at noon (EST) simultaneously in many cities in Colombia and several others around the world. The convocation was started by a young Colombian engineer on the popular website Facebook and snowballed from there.

Colombians are quite rightly fed up with the idealized portrayal of the terrorists as a guerrilla up-in-arms for a just cause. Reality is the FARC are a criminal organization that indiscriminately kills civilians, displaces rural populations, and leaves behind a trail of landmines. These terrorists finance their operations through kidnapping and extortion and the most lucrative business of drug-trafficking.

Venezuela's president Chavez recently called for the FARC to be de-listed as a terrorist organization; a position not surprising given his ties with them, his support providing them with arms and ammunition, free circulation in Venezuelan territory, and a political stage soon to be enhanced with the opening of an official FARC office in Caracas.

Colombians hope to show the world on 4 February how overwhelmingly they reject the terrorists. Only those who have endured decades of baseless crimes know full well what it means for a society and a country. Just as Spaniards exposed the myth of the Basque terrorists of ETA having any support, all Colombians will stand up united rejecting terrorism. They should count on the unequivocal support of the international community.

Only some "cubicle" revolutionaries and miss-informed romantics (still idealizing the South American revolutionary) in North America and Europe believe the FARC's rhetoric of struggling for a better life for Colombians. The evidence of the FARC's brutality is widespread and so well-documented that it is impossible to evade. Complicity is the only explanation for any attempt of justification based on ideological premises.

After the FARC released two of the hundreds of hostages they hold in captivity, the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, was asked if the EU would change its stance towards them, as suggested by Chavez. His answer was very clear: "The terrorists must free the hostages with no conditions."