Indigenous leaders battle forced recruitment of children in Colombia's Cauca region

In the darkness of a minefield, a boy named David made his escape. Hours of careful movement through the pitch black, every step calculated to avoid the explosives buried beneath his feet, brought him to a moment of surrender—not to the armed group that had forced him into their ranks, but to the Colombian Army. He raised his arms as a signal, a prearranged gesture that would keep him alive. The military knew to expect him because Ana, an indigenous leader in the region, had received word from David's family that he would attempt to flee. She had contacted the Ombudsman's office. She had set the machinery in motion. For four years, Ana has been doing this work: fielding desperate calls from families whose children have been taken, navigating the bureaucracy of rescue, moving through the territory with no security detail and no salary, keeping her phone on at all times because she knows that sometimes a life depends on whether she answers.

David's story has become ordinary in the North Cauca region of Colombia, one of the country's most contested zones. According to the Association of Indigenous Councils of North Cauca, more than 300 minors have been forcibly enlisted over the past two years. The organization's human rights team has documented 117 cases in 2023 alone, though they acknowledge the real number is far higher—many families never report what has happened. The Ombudsman's office has recorded 344 child recruitment cases nationally since 2021, and nearly half of those occurred this year. Seventy-five percent involve indigenous children. The majority come from Cauca, followed by Nariño, Arauca, and Putumayo.

The armed groups operating in North Cauca have evolved since the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC. What emerged were numerous illegal militias that grew rapidly, some expanding from roughly 60 members to 1,000 in a year or two. The Jaime Martínez column, part of the Central General Staff dissident faction, holds the most power in the region and has been accused of the most forced recruitments. The National Liberation Army, or ELN, competes with them for territory and recruits. The United Nations flagged Colombia's child recruitment problem in 2022, marking the country's return to the global report on children and armed conflict after years of absence.

The tactics have shifted and worsened. Between 2018 and 2019, armed groups targeted teenagers aged 14 to 17, often selecting children of indigenous authorities or members of the Indigenous Guard because they possessed political education and physical training—and because their disappearance would wound the community's social fabric. By 2020, the organization began documenting recruitments of children as young as 11. Now the groups target children living in extreme poverty or experiencing abuse, promising them food, clothing, or money. Mass abductions have become common. In March of this year, armed men raided schools in the municipality of Caloto, snatching groups of children from outside their classrooms and from the road as they walked to school. Two of those children were later recovered by their community in the town of El Tambo.

Indigenous communities have responded by establishing their own systems of protection. The Indigenous Guard now positions itself near schools when armed strangers appear in the area. They maintain alert networks. They have managed to intercept vehicles carrying children headed toward recruiters. But this vigilance has made them targets. The armed groups have grown more sophisticated in their methods, creating recruitment networks that operate like criminal enterprises. Some groups delegate the work to young people who recruit their peers. Others hire intermediaries—people paid per child delivered—who identify targets, follow them, convince them, abduct them, and transport them to camps. Children recruited in North Cauca are sometimes moved south to other parts of the department or to cities like Tumaco and Buenaventura, where the armed conflict is more intense.

Children who escape or are recovered arrive with visible and invisible wounds. Some carry injuries from explosives. Others bear the trauma of sexual violence. The worst cases are those who do not return alive. Several months ago, 40 bodies appeared in the rural area of Silvia. Some were minors who had been forcibly recruited. Families claimed the bodies in secret, afraid of retaliation, and buried them at night in what indigenous communities call 'planting' the dead. Edwin Capaz, a Nasa indigenous leader and former regional councilor, speaks of the war as something that is cutting the future from indigenous peoples. "It has concentrated itself in these generations of children, adolescents, and young people, which is our most vulnerable side," he said. Andrea, who works with a local organization, uses different language but means the same thing: "They are uprooting our seed."

Ana continues her work without institutional support, without a security detail, without payment. She has learned to move through danger because she has had to. She juggles a parallel job to pay her bills and fund her rescue efforts. She deals with negligent officials, poor coordination between local and national institutions, and the enormous cost of relocating entire families out of the territory. She attends to the physical and psychological needs of traumatized children. She takes denunciations in remote areas where she has become known, marked, a target. Yet she does not stop. A young woman who has begun volunteering with her watched their recent conversation and asked, simply, how Ana manages to do it all. Ana answered: "Because it is done with love. In our hands is the power to save lives."

The issue of forced child recruitment has not appeared on the agenda of government peace negotiations with the ELN or the Central General Staff. It has not gained the prominence of kidnapping or other crimes. Indigenous leaders are demanding it become an urgent priority, not only for indigenous peoples but for the nation. Meanwhile, Ana and the organizations working alongside her continue with what they have, which is not much—determination, networks of community members, phones that never stop ringing, and the knowledge that children are still being taken.