March against FARC in Manizales, Colombia
March against FARC > SpecialsBy Beto Agudelo
Monday 4 February 2008 22:36 COT
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Just a little fragment of the crowd walking through the Santander Avenue in Manizales (Photo: John Jairo Bonilla / equinoXio)
A stream of hope spills through the arteries and overflows the heart of the city. A white stream with yellow, blue and red faint stripes travelling across over ten kilometres with a funeral pace despite the smiling and festive faces. Walking in silence almost all the time, with very few people yelling slogans quite different from those the city is used accustomed to hear from the retrograde, third-worlder leftists.
The city surprised herself with the great number of people walking, and with faith shining in the faces of men, women, children, the elderly, unborn kids along with mothers of slow but straight pace, walking along a route traced to say the world they’re weary, they do not want anything to do with those who claim to fight for the people by actually hurting them, with their inhuman cruelty in their fight; to say "it’s time to live again, free of the chains of fear and blood".
There were, of course, those who tried to turn the protest into an act of the state, but they were so few they became insignificant among the great tide of noisy silence advancing with a single slogan: No more war. No more kidnappings. No more FARC.
An exhausted old woman, sitting on the sidewalk, rejected the help of the kind police officers who offered her a lift: she could walk no more with those tired feet, but she wanted, with her presence, to cheer those who could go on walking.
Early in the morning, a beautiful blue sky hailed this small republican village with a medieval spirit an dreams of progress, and we all could see that old grumpy guy, the ancient Cumanday that today we call Ruiz, was the first to wear the white t-shirt. How could we reject such an invitation?
Tags: Caldas, Colombia, demonstration, FARC, guerrilla, Manizales, March against FARC, No more FARC, terrorism
