‘They began taking my friends from school’: the children being recruited by Colombia’s armed groups

Andrea, left, who escaped from an armed group, and Ana, who was at high risk of being recruited but fled, in the grounds of the Benposta school in Bogotá. Photograph: Harriet Barber

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.