Colombia’s Armed Groups Expand Child Soldier Recruitmen
“Innocence Abducted: Surge in Child Soldier Recruitment in Colombia”
The last time Marta saw her 14-year-old son was three months ago – he was wearing rebel army fatigues and holding a rifle as he marched down the street with the other child soldiers.
She ran to the commanding officer and begged him to release her boy, who had been abducted nine months earlier in the middle of the night from their home in eastern Colombia at age 13. The officer, part of a dissident group of the now-demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, waved her away, threatening to shoot her if she didn’t leave.
“All I do is pray and cry and cry and cry and ask God to get my boy out of there,” said Marta, who asked to remain anonymous in order to share her family’s experience safely.
The 40-year-old mother is not alone. Hundreds of mothers across Colombia have lost children to similar armed groups, either through abduction or coercion.
In its annual report for 2024, the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that Colombia faces its worst humanitarian outlook since the 2016 peace deal with the FARC rebel group. It drew special attention to surging child recruitment by armed groups, finding that 58 percent of those living in conflict zones cited it as the top risk in their communities.
As Colombia’s long-running and complex conflicts continue to escalate, with multiple ceasefires and dialogues between the state and armed groups collapsing this year, criminal organisations increasingly rely on underage soldiers to bolster their ranks.
