In spring last year, Ana’s* friends began to disappear. Members of an armed group had begun recruiting children in her village in Colombia’s north-west region of Norte de Santander, promising them food, money, mobile phones and motorcycles.
“They began taking all of the young people, the boys and the girls, my friends from school. I was so scared, I had to shut myself away,” says Ana, then 14.
In Colombia, armed groups are battling for control of territory vital to the drug trade, including coca fields, and illegal mining and arms routes.
In remote and marginalised rural parts of the country, communities are more vulnerable to pressure from armed groups, who are luring children away through bribes and coercion.
Documented cases of child recruitment into armed groups rose from a few dozen in 2021 to more than 600 in 2024, according to figures from a government watchdog. It is a figure experts say vastly underestimates the real toll as many families stay silent, afraid of the consequences if they speak out.
Dozens of Ana’s peers who enlisted either vanished to a new life as foot soldiers or, in some cases, returned to the village as informants and to enlist other children.
“They started driving around, going house to house. They were watching us,” Ana says. “One of my classmates who had enlisted began harassing me, telling me I had to join. After school they would follow me home.”
When a boyfriend of Ana’s friend enlisted, the girl ended the relationship. He later returned with his new comrades. “They tied her up and took her,” says Ana.
Ana, then at high risk of being taken by one of the armed groups, locked herself away. “I stopped leaving the house, stopped socialising, stopped going to school,” she says. A month later, she and her mother fled to a nearby city.
While children have long been caught up in Colombia’s internal conflict, the tactics used to recruit them have changed.
In the past, armed groups would simply seize children from schools, says Juanita Goebertus, a former congresswoman in Colombia and now Americas director at Human Rights Watch. Today, they rely more on persuasion – through social media, by romanticising life with a weapon, by making young people feel they belong.
Juan* was recruited at 15. His town was controlled by an armed group that imposed curfews and dictated daily life. He says he was “afraid of picking up a weapon” but that his family’s financial situation left him with little choice. “I turned to them to help my family,” he says, “but they made me do bad things.”
Sixteen-year-old Andrea* says she was persuaded to join a group by her boyfriend and her best friend, who had both enlisted.
They say their tasks varied widely, from selling drugs and acting as informants, to conducting violent raids and fighting on battlefields.
At first, Juan says he was made to sell cocaine and act as an informant. Any attempt to leave, he says, would be punished with death. “One of the kids ran away. When they found him, they called us to a meeting. They killed him right there.
“I was already involved, so there was nothing else I could do. I had to do everything they said,” he says.
Later, Juan was sent on a mission with a dozen others, children and adults, to attack a police checkpoint. An officer was shot. Afterwards, he was paid 1,500 pesos, (30p). “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says. “It was terrible.”
Scott Campbell, representative in Colombia of the UN high commissioner for human rights, says children are being used as “frontline fighters to protect the older, more experienced members”, according to reports from battlefields.
“There are some very ugly percentages of child victims among the dead after fighting between the armed groups,” he says.
This month, Iris Marín, Colombia’s human rights ombudsman, said seven children had been killed in an airstrike on a rebel group in the south of the country, with the minors being used as “human shields”.
Elizabeth Dickinson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, says “taking minors is not just about amassing troops. It also crushes community resistance and keeps families quiet.”
Sexual violence is also rife among the child recruits, experts and witnesses say. Women who escaped sexual slavery by armed groups in Catatumbo told the Guardian in August that they had seen girls as young as 11 held in cages and raped.
All three children, Ana, who fled before being recruited, and Juan and Andrea, who escaped, now live in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, at a school for children at risk of recruitment.
The school, run by the organisation Benposta Nación de Muchachos, has offered refuge, education and counselling to children displaced or targeted by armed groups for more than 50 years.
The centre says there are 87 children living at the school, but that new arrivals keep coming, some as young as 10 years old.
Andrea says she managed to escape recruitment after her mother found out. “She started crying. I was already feeling sick, I was already scared.” After months of counselling at Benposta, Andrea now hopes to one day train as a psychologist.
Juan fled after a year with the armed group. “I was trapped, but one of my old teachers saw what was happening and helped me leave.”
Now he dreams of becoming a footballer. “I’m living a new life,” he says.
Ana has been at Benposta for a year. She says she has caught up on the education she missed, and wants only to finish her studies. “War doesn’t lead to anything good,” she says.
* Names have been changed to protect identities
