RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Over 14,000 Colombian minors have been recruited over the past 20 years by illegal armed groups, particularly the demobilized guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), said yesterday Miguel Ceballos, the country’s High Commissioner for Peace.
“In Colombia, over the past 20 years, armed groups have recruited over 14,000 children and adolescents. The former FARC is responsible for at least 9,000 of these cases and the extinct [paramilitary] United Self-Defenses of Colombia (AUC) for more than 1,500,” Ceballos said in an audio recording released yesterday by the Peace Commission.
Miguel Caballos said the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas have now recruited some 2,500 minors, while FARC dissidents and the Gulf Clan, the country’s main criminal group, “already count more than 200 minors as victims of this crime”.
“We cannot allow one more child to be recruited. We demand that the armed groups release all of them so that they can rejoin their families”, Ceballos stressed.
The official urged the groups to release them, at a time when Colombia is in quarantine to fight the novel coronavirus. “The children merit respect and the chance to be at their parents’ side to care for their lives and their health,” he said.
In this regard, former ELN guerrilla member Carlos Arturo Velandia, known as “Felipe Torres” and who in March was appointed by the Colombian government to promote peace in the country, explained that the war scenarios “are not appropriate for boys, girls, and adolescents”.
“The camp or the groups will never be a place for children to grow up happy. As a citizen and promoter of peace, I condemn all irregular armed organizations and urge them to return the children they hold to their homes, from where they should not have been taken,” Torres said.
For his part, Gerardo Antonio Bermúdez, also known as “Francisco Galán” and who has also been appointed as a peace promoter, said that war and violence “cannot be a path for minors”.
“Children must be withdrawn from all forms of violence. The best way to do this is to end the war. But until that happens, I call on all the armed groups to release the children from their ranks to their families and give them food and clothes,” said “Galán,” who was released from prison in March to serve as peace promoter.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported on March 4th that Colombia recorded at least 987 violations of international humanitarian law in 2019.
Of the 987 violations reported to the 13 ICRC offices in the country, 77 percent were related to violent threats, murders, acts of sexual violence, and recruitment of minors.
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