BOGOTA: Thousands of Colombians joined demonstrations Tuesday demanding that the country's oldest leftist guerrilla group, the FARC, free all its hostages, ten days after rebels murdered four men who had been held for more than a decade.
The FARC responded with a promise, posted on its webpage, to release hostages, but without saying whom it might release or when. It also blamed the recent hostage killings on a "senseless" bid by the military to rescue them.
Protesters earlier marched in Bogota, Cali, Medellin and several other cities across the Andean nation, chanting, "Freedom, freedom, freedom."
"No more FARC," others shouted, using the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which has waged a 47-year guerrilla war against the state.
But there were others in the crowds who also called on the military not to put hostages' lives in danger with risky rescue attempts.
The protesters, wearing T-shirts with slogans demanding the release of rebel hostages and brandishing signs against the guerrilla group, began marching early in the day.
The demonstrations were organized by civic groups with the support of the government, which gave public employees time off to participate and had openly called on Colombians to join the protests.
"We want to live in a country at peace, a country without kidnappings or violence," President Juan Manuel Santos said in an address in the little town of Villeta in the central department of Cundinamarca.
"No one should stay at home, no one should stay in their offices, because we are all going to march with a single purpose, a purpose that unites us all: to say 'yes' to liberty and 'no' to kidnapping," he said at an event late Monday, according to a presidential statement.
The marches were held 10 days after the assassination of four captives -- three policemen and a soldier -- who had been held hostage for more than 12 years. Among them was the FARC's longest-held hostage, Jose Libio Martinez, who was kidnapped December 21, 1997.
The four were shot to death by their guards when their jungle camp came under attack, the authorities have said.
Another hostage was able to escape amid the confusion.
Founded in 1964, the Marxist FARC is holding at least 11 police and soldiers hostages with the goal of trading them for several hundred imprisoned guerrillas. They also are holding an unknown number of civilians for ransom.
In its statement, the FARC promised to arrange "the unilateral liberation of the prisoners of war that we had announced in earlier missives, even though some of them fell in the senseless military rescue attempt."
"We profoundly deplore that four of the six prisoners of war that we were going to free unilaterally in response to their petition in August, have died in an irrational military rescue attempt by the Colombian army, when they were marching to the place where we planned to turn them over to you," it said.
"We are surprised by the attitude of the Colombian government, which we do not doubt was aware of what we had determined to do. The FARC wanted to free them alive, but the government of Juan Manuel Santos preferred to return them dead to their loved ones."
Colombia's chief of police, General Oscar Naranjo, insisted that the protests are a major concern for the FARC, which has suffered the losses of key leaders in recent years.
"It generates tremendous concern, real anguish, for them to see Colombians pressuring them and rejecting their terrorist methods," he said.
But with an estimated 8,000 fighters, the FARC remains entrenched in large parts of the country, and even protest organizers said they doubted the day of demonstrations would have an immediate impact on the group.
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