‘There was so much fear’: the struggle to keep children out of Colombia’s armed gangs
TThe road leaving Caloto winds through a lush valley dotted with fields of grazing cows, then into the hills past a patchwork of pineapple farms, small patches of untouched rainforest and the surprisingly vibrant green of coca plantations.
This valley in the foothills of the northern Andes looks deceptively calm on an early winter afternoon, but it is in one of Colombia’s most dangerous regions, especially for children.
Eight years ago, in 2016, a peace deal officially ended the country’s long civil war and won the Nobel Peace Prize for then-President Juan Manuel Santos. But in the western Cauca region, where the war had been particularly violent and where peace was eagerly awaited, the peace lasted barely six months. Government promises about alternative jobs and land reforms were never fulfilled.
Breakaway guerrilla factions opposed to the peace deal, and demobilized fighters unable to find work, once again took up arms and battled with criminal gangs for control of the area’s lucrative trade in drugs and illegally mined gold. There were at one point 16 armed groups in the area, and while they have consolidated to about a quarter of that number, the violence has reignited, mutated and evolved into a new brutality, indigenous activists say.
The groups are in constant need of new foot soldiers. They are turning to the communities they are fighting to try to accommodate this. Over the past four years, more than 850 children have been taken from here to fight; hundreds are still missing.
“The hardest and most difficult thing is what is happening to our children,” said Arbey Noscue Silva, leader of the Kiwe Thegnas Indigenous Guard, an unarmed group that has been protecting indigenous communities and leaders in Cauca for two decades.
“We see that the armed groups start to lure them away at the age of 13 or 14 with things that we cannot offer them,” said Silva, a member of NASA, one of the best organized and most numerous indigenous groups in the region. .
Some children are forcibly taken to fight, but many are lured by promises of easy work, goods such as new phones or clothes, or even plastic surgery or dental care. In a historically marginalized area, with few economic opportunities for young people, this offer can be hard to resist.
Caloto has one of the highest rates of child recruitment in Colombia, says Vanessa Noscue, project coordinator for the area at War Child, one of three charities supported by the Guardian And Observer Christmas appeal this year, alongside Doctors Without Borders and Parallel Histories. The call has so far raised more than 1 million euros.
The increasing violence of recent years has brought a grim kind of equality. “In the past, boys and men were more likely to be killed or recruited. Now they are also targeting women,” said Noscue.
Some women are targets of sexual abuse and exploitation. In a previous role as a counselor for young girls, Noscue heard from some who had been forced to use cocaine to create an addiction, and to accept one of the fighters as a ‘sexual partner’.
Many, like the boys, go straight to the front lines. “The most terrible thing is that armed groups are the first to send them to the front lines, despite their lack of experience,” said Yonier Esteban Pacho Acalo, a NASA youth leader. “There are 16 and 17-year-olds who are not with us now,” added Acalo, who has lost several friends to the violence and worries about the pressure on his 13-year-old brother.
The community understood the full extent of the child recruitment problem in 2019 when they stepped up monitoring, said Anyi Zapata of the Association of Indigenous Councils in Northern Cauca (ACIN). As the first female head of ACIN’s Network for the Protection of Lives, Zapata is responsible for security and human rights in the 22 indigenous territories across Cauca.
Amid increasing reports of missing children, ACIN monitors began contacting families and communities to confirm and record cases of child recruitment into armed groups. That year they recorded 10 cases; in 2020 there were 110; and by 2021 it had reached 272 cases.
“When we started investigating our territories, we discovered a large number of missing children. We realized they were being kidnapped,” Zapata said. “There was so much fear: mothers buried their children in the middle of the night because it was so secret.”
In the four years to August 2024, ACIN recorded 851 cases of child recruitment, a figure they say reflects only part of the problem. The majority of these children are still missing and dozens are victims of the fighting.
Zapata said: “We managed to rescue about 300 people and know that about 40 to 50 have died. We don’t know how many of the others are in mass graves.”
Silva, the Kiwe Thegnas coordinator, sees the recruitment and trafficking of children as part of a broader attack on indigenous communities by armed groups. In the past year, the number of assassinations of NASA spiritual leaders, whose role in the community was largely respected, has risen sharply, even during the most violent periods of the civil war when other NASA leaders were attacked. “This is something you can’t replace. There are very few of them, and killing them is actually a process of exterminating our community,” he said.
A total of thirteen spiritual leaders have been killed in Cauca since 2012, but six of them were killed in the past year. These were all people who had been chosen for their roles because they were born “with the spirit” and then trained for decades. These losses demoralize the community, weaken its social structure and risk undermining its hold on traditional lands, he said, making it easier for outsiders in the armed group to move into an area.
“You don’t just lose the individual, you lose all their knowledge, the whole cultural practice,” Silva said. And between recruiting children and targeting the elderly, the groups focus “on the future and past of the community.”
But this corner of Colombia has long been known for its rebelliousness and violence, with a decades-long tradition among indigenous communities of resistance against armed outsiders – whether guerrillas, state forces or paramilitaries.
“Colombians say ‘Cauca resiste’, ‘Cauca stands strong’,” Noscue said. The War Child project she coordinates – Mae Kiwe or Mother Earth – is part of this resistance and supports ACIN’s efforts in Cauca to reach young people in danger. The name reflects the connection that many Colombian indigenous communities see between the exploitation of their land and natural environment and the exploitation of their youth.
In Caloto, a youth center provides a safe space for activities such as sports, music and art, where young people can talk about the pressures they face. It aims to strengthen community ties and provide alternative ways to earn a living in communities with few jobs and where fighting seems to be the only way to get paid.
“We always say we’re not a solution – we’re another option for young people,” said 22-year-old Willington Garcia Canas, a youth leader at the center who was himself drawn there by the hub’s dance program. . It is open to both young people and children, as people are vulnerable well into their 20s.
Natalia, who asked to remain partially anonymous, grew up in Caloto until she went to fight at age 18 in a war that had officially ended four years earlier. It was a life full of hunger, fear, cold, damp and the constant threat of death and loss.
She said she joined voluntarily but left after three years. Now she would never again help a young person follow her path. “We’d be soaked in rain, baked in the sun, without anything to eat,” she said. “We saw our comrades fall. I learned to appreciate my parents because I had a roof and food.”
Even registering the recruitment of children is dangerous – because it risks disrupting the flow of fighters to some of the most ruthless and violent groups in the country. Sandra Patricia Silva, head of ACIN’s human rights observatory, which collects most of the data, has faced death threats and was recently followed by a group of armed men.
“It scares you, we go to all areas without guards, and sometimes I work alone,” she said.
In March this year, 65-year-old NASA leader Carmelina Yule Paví was murdered in nearby Toribio while trying to prevent armed groups from recruiting a child. But the indigenous guard, the Kiwe Thegnas, has an even more difficult task. They try to intercept groups recruiting children and helping young people escape, without weapons to support them. They carry only symbolic wooden clubs decorated with ribbons of red and green, the colors of the earth and blood. Their uniform consists of blue vests worn over normal clothing; their weapon is moral authority and community solidarity.
Their approach sounds unlikely, but the force has decades of Civil War-era experience. The rescue team operates 24 hours a day and often receives several calls a day.
Silva sometimes travels to meet with commanders who are detaining children and tries to convince them to let them leave.
“I try to open up, to tell them that kids are bored and will try to run away – their mother misses them,” he said. Sometimes it works.