All across Colombia on February 4, huge crowds held marches and rallies to denounce the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), a leftist rebel group that, counting its precursor groups, has been waging a guerrilla campaign since the 1940s. FARC holds hundreds of hostages, including soldiers and police officers captured in battle, politicians and public officials abducted for political propaganda reasons, and people thought to come from families wealthy enough to be coerced into paying ransom.

Colombian communities abroad, including the one here, joined in the protests.

FARC operates mainly in rural areas of Colombia and is very strong along the Panamanian border adjacent to the Darien. However, even though FARC operates in large, sparsely populated geographical areas, the group has relatively little public support among Colombians. Especially unpopular is the rebels' industry of kidnapping people for ransom or, more rarely, as a political statement.

The issue has come to a head recently, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez offering to mediate a hostage release, being rebuffed by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, and then despite the opposition of the Bogota government arranging the release of two high-profile FARC hostages whom the group had held for years. Especially annoying to Uribe and many Colombians was Chávez's subsequent call for governments around the world to remove FARC from their lists of terrorist groups and recognize them as belligerents in a long-running civil conflict. That suggestion has garnered little support anywhere.

Even a lot of human rights activists who are as critical or more of the Colombian government and the paramilitary death squads with which it is linked as they are of the FARC have joined in the outcry against FARC and its kidnappings. Thus, although some particularly thuggish Colombians --- including backers of paramilitary groups that have on several occasions attacked Panama, stealing aircraft, assassinating Panamanian public officials and Colombians against whom they held grudges, and vandalizing churches, schools and health clinics here --- were supporting the anti-FARC protests, most of the protesters probably can't fairly be described as partisans of the other sides' violence. (FARC, by the way, has also occasionally attacked Panama, and in 1993 kidnapped three American missionaries from a village in the Darien, and killed them several years later after fruitless attempts to extort money for their release.)

Shown here are protesters, mostly Colombians, who marched in Panama City streets that on February 4 were largely devoid of traffic as many city residents were in the Interior for Carnival celebrations.

There is a strong current in Panamanian public opinion, actually one of the motives for Panama's existence as an independent country, that we don't want to have any part in Colombia's incessant internal warfare. Colombians by far comprise the largest group of non-citizens living in Panama, some legally, some illegally. To many a Panamanian, the concept of "Colombian" is largely synonymous with "thug" and the conflict between FARC and other leftist rebels on one side and the government and the right-wing paramilitaries on the other is seen as something of a war among ruthless gangsters, with one of the main prizes at stake the ability to collect payoffs from the drug cartels. It's surely an unfair stereotype to apply to most of the Colombians here, but the fact that so many people adhere to it is a powerful fact that lurks under the surface of Panamanian political, social and business life.