August 2001

A hand-painting of the literary hero Don Quixote adorns the wall of a schoolroom in the mountain village of Uribe in eastern Colombia. The walls and roof of the building are still pockmarked with bullet holes after a bloody clash in mid-1998 between Marxist guerrillas and army troops, who had a base in the adjoining field. The information technology room does not have a single computer. The school library consists of three shelves of faded textbooks, some more than 20 years old.

Nobody in the village has ever graduated from high school and gone on to university. Most students just drift back to their family plot of land to wield a machete, rope cows, and tend maize, yucca or coffee. Years of government neglect have left thousands of children in rural communities across Colombia facing the same Quixotic struggle to get an education and progress in life.

Their plight is the same regardless of the long-running war and regardless of whether their region is controlled by Communist rebels, right-wing paramilitary gangs, or state security forces.

In the Ranks of the FARC
One of the new students in Uribe this spring is a 17-year-old named Franklin. For the last three years his education had been focussed on how to shoot straight and how to clean an AK-47 assault rifle in the ranks of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America’s largest surviving 1960s Marxist rebel force. But with the consent of his commanders he quit the war and came back home to study.

"You can make war without a gun in your hand, but you need education so that people will listen to you," Franklin said, explaining that he still believed that the FARC’s 37-year war to topple the state and usher in a socialist regime was just.

United Nations officials now estimate up to 6,000 under-18s are swelling the ranks of the two main guerrilla factions or the rival right-wing paramilitary forces. They fear it could get worse.

"If the state does not come up with responses to provide vulnerable children in rural areas with a real alternative, rather than just drug crops and the war, then we’re looking at a latent potential figure for recruitment of around two million," said UNICEF’s director in Colombia, Carel De Rooy.

Internationally, the guerrillas and paramilitary gangs have been roundly condemned for recruiting or press-ganging into service children as young as 10 years old.

When Franklin went off to the war, his mother cried. But there was no food on the table at home and she had no money to clothe him. Joining the guerrillas, who had camps around the area where he lived, was the only way he could hope to change his fortunes.

"It wasn’t easy when I joined the FARC because my mother cried. But she had no way to help me with food or study. I went to the FARC and they gave me boots, clothes, food and drugs if I got sick," he said.

According to a 1998 study on child warriors by Colombia’s government Human Rights Ombudsman, around 10 percent of total guerrilla forces consisted of under-18s, with that figure rising above 30 percent in some individual guerrilla combat units. The report gave no overall figure for paramilitary recruitment of minors, considered far less than among guerrilla groups. Colombia has signed but not yet ratified an additional protocol to international human law that seeks to raise the minimum age of recruitment by warring factions from 15 to 18.

In its human rights report for 2000, the U.S. State Department described appalling conditions facing child soldiers fighting with the guerrillas: "The FARC lured or forced hundreds of children into its ranks...Once recruited the children are virtual prisoners of their commanders and subject to various forms of abuse. Sexual abuse among girls is a particular problem."

Those accusations intensified in November and December last year as the army decimated a FARC combat column near the town of Surata, in northern Santander province. In weeks of fighting, the military killed 61 guerrillas and captured 120 others, many of whom deserted. At least 54 of those captured were badly trained and poorly motivated under-18s. Some of the shell-shocked youngsters paraded in front of TV cameras by army commanders said they had been lured into rebel ranks by false promises of wages or mistreated by rebel warlords.

In a downtown district of Bogotá, the government’s Family Welfare Institute has a carefully guarded hostel for child guerrillas who have either deserted or been captured in combat. None of the children interviewed spoke of being forcibly recruited or abused, but they were visibly afraid that their former comrades-in-arms may hunt them down and kill them in retaliation for desertion.

"Yes, it’s difficult. I can’t really leave here, how can I explain, I am marked, and I can’t really go into the street much, because in these places there are guerrillas, and they can kill me. I just can’t relax, I cannot visit my family, because it’s so dangerous," said Adriana, 17, who deserted in 2000 after joining the FARC at age 12.

Francisco, just 13, is equally nervous, perhaps due to the trauma last year of being ordered to kill a policeman with a hand grenade. He fled the FARC because he wanted to see his mother, but she told him to give himself up to the army so he wouldn’t be tracked down and shot by the guerrillas.

The Best of a Bad Set of Options?

In contrast to these horror stories, other child soldiers seem at ease in rebel ranks and have no intention of leaving, despite the hardships of hiding and fighting in the mountains and jungles, and often going hungry for days.

Adriana Rondon is 27 years old and commander of a 24-person guerrilla unit. She said she took up arms 15 years ago, when she was just 12. The guerrillas gave her a pistol until she was big enough to handle a rifle. The daughter of peasants from central Huila province, she ran off to the FARC and begged to sign up after security forces burst into the family home and beat her father, accusing him of giving the rebels food.

"'I just wanted revenge, and I begged the guerrillas to let me go with them,'' she said, speaking at a guerrilla camp in southern Caquetá province.

Like Rondon, 15-year-old Martha is the daughter of peasant laborers from Huila province. She is currently based in a rebel-held village along the banks of the Caguán River in Caquetá. She joined the guerrillas a year ago and is presently recovering from a bullet wound in her left thigh. Martha accidentally shot herself with 38-caliber revolver while on guard duty as she tried to swat a mosquito.

"My parents were day laborers. They worked on coffee and rice farms. They always worked in little villages and there was never any school. I once went to school for a week, but then we moved on again. I can’t read or write, but they’re trying to teach me in the guerrillas," she explained.

There were usually guerrillas present in or near the villages where she lived as a child, and Martha said she was impressed by their uniforms and discipline. Her parents were furious when Martha joined up, but so far she has rejected her family’s pleas that she come home.

"One day after I joined up the commander came to me and told me I had to go home because my mother and father were complaining. But I told him I didn’t want to go and I stayed. I always liked the guerrillas," she said.

Rebel commanders have agreed publicly to rethink their policy of recruiting child warriors, and they have vowed to comply with their minimum age limit of 15 as set out in internal recruitment norms.

"The FARC must correct errors. We have identified some children and demobilized them," senior FARC military strategist Jorge Briceno told a group of some 250 villagers in Uribe earlier this year. But that decision seems to have been motivated by the poor performance of children on the battlefield rather than any over-riding humanitarian concern.

Whatever the publicly stated intentions of the warring factions may be, Uribe village mayor Ramiro Trujillo believes children will continue to volunteer for the war until there are real alternatives.

"The government says it doesn’t want children going off to join the guerrillas, but what are they supposed to do," he said. "Nobody has any vision of a different future. We finish educating them and they continue being poor."

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