Al is definitely right that "The 'human rights bureaucrats' who have long straddled the fence with dishonest posturing that claimed revolutionary violence in defense of the poor and paramilitary violence in defense of wealth are moral equivalents are participants in this double standard."  And I think that sometimes this false equivalence is more than just a matter of misguided attempts at fair-mindedness. I remember during the last round of failed negotiations with the FARC, Human Rights Watch seemed to have a propensity for releasing reports about FARC attrocities whenever the Pastrana administration was debating whether to renew the authorization for the demilitarized zone where the talks were taking place.

And certainly the FARC has never carried out anything remotely resembling the systematic campaign of massacres and assasinations that the AUC has mounted.

However, I think we also have to be careful not to fall into the trap of romanticizing the FARC.  (Let me say before going any further that I don't think Al has ever said or done anything that could be construed as romanticizing the FARC.)   The Workers World Party and other Marxixt sects tend to take the position that anyone opposed to US imperialism is a legitimate revolutionary -- their backing of the FARC is right in line with ther past support for Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and the North Korean government.  And they routinely ignore the fact that the FARC does inflict real suffering on the people they claim to be liberating by carrying out forced recruitment in indigenous communities, forcing campesinos off their land for refusing to pay their "taxes,"  executing deserters, and using indiscriminate gas canister bombs that have a propensity for veering off course and killing civilians instead of hitting their intended targets.  I have met victims of all of these abuses.

I also think that the FARC of 2005 is very different from the FARC of 2004.  The wholesale slaughter of Patriotic Union Party members in the 1980's claimed the lives of many of those who represented the more humane tendencies within the organization.

That being said I also know that in many areas people depend on the FARC and the ELN for defense against the paramilitaries.  Following the AUC's Mapiripan massacre of 1997 the main criticism people in the region had of the FARC was that they didn't come quickly enough to stop the paramilitaries.  

We need to be clear-eyed about the FARC in both directions -- neither denying their very real violence nor allowing discussion of that violence to distract from our focus on the wholesale, systematic war against the poor being waged by the AUC and the Colombian military with the backing of the US.