In the weeks before Edgar Tumiñá was killed with nine shots to his head, the indigenous leader had taken every precaution to avoid being seen while visiting his family in Toribio, a town in the southwestern part of Colombia called Cauca. Tumi, as everyone knew him, had gotten so many death threats that it had become a monotonous form of terror. “They want me dead,” he told me in November. Three months later, he was assassinated.
Tumi was a quiet, muscular man in his late 40s. He scraped by as a small-hold farmer and had never held a gun. But armed groups vying for control of illicit economies in his home region considered him one of their biggest threats. Tumi was standing in their way, protecting a coveted resource: child recruits. When Tumi and a skeleton crew of fellow indigenous leaders heard about a child being taken by militants, they would drive into the jungle, walk and canoe for hours, and wait as long as it took to get a meeting with armed commanders, pleading for the lives of girls and boys as young as 12. I saw him several times late last year; he was often surrounded by the kids he had saved.
Since the demobilization of the FARC, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, following a landmark 2016 peace deal, other armed groups in Colombia have grown in strength and number, each seeking a larger stake in the country’s illicit economies. The Colombian state has a long history of fighting such ideological guerrilla movements seeking to unseat the government in Bogotá. But today’s armed groups have no interest in combating the state. Instead, their primary goal is to control territory in order to access illicit rents through drug production and trafficking, mining, and gun running. Their primary adversaries are other criminals and communities that might resist them.
As the armed groups have sought foot soldiers to advance their quest for territory, the rate of child recruitment in Colombia has reached its highest point in more than a decade. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of reported recruits rose roughly 1,000 percent, from 36 children to more than 450. This official number is surely an undercount, however, because many families decline to report missing kids for fear of reprisal. Recent encounters between Colombian law enforcement and armed groups suggest that children make up an alarming portion of their rank and file. In January, 112 members of the 33rd Front, an armed group along the border with Venezuela, turned themselves in to authorities; 20 of them were minors. In January, a clash between two rival armed groups in Guaviare, in the Amazon region, left nearly two dozen dead; a third of those who died were under the age of 18. Witnesses said that many of the children cried and ran in fear when the gunfire started.
Cauca, a region rich in mining, illicit crops, and trafficking routes, has become a focal point in Colombia’s armed conflict. A senior military official described the region to me as “a dispensary of child soldiers.” Three-quarters of last year’s reported conscripts came from Cauca. Recruiters trick, lure, cajole, or simply abduct the children from their homes and send them across the country, where they are sold to the highest bidders. Children from Cauca have been rescued by civilians, recovered by the military, or found dead in battles as far away as the Amazon region and the border with Venezuela.
Tumi’s assassination is not just a singular tragedy. It exposes an alarming fact about armed and criminal groups in Colombia today: none of them would be able to exert the control they do if not for the children in their ranks. Without these unpaid, barely trained foot soldiers and the leverage they provide, sustaining the conflict at its current scale would not be possible.
Apart from the efforts of individuals such as Tumi, little has been done to prevent child recruitment in Colombia. Government-run rehabilitation programs often fail to address the complex needs of rescued children, many of whom suffer from psychological trauma and social stigma and are at risk of retaliation. A small number of civil society groups help Colombian youth resist the pull of recruitment by providing safe spaces for sports and other after-school activities. Some of them had previously received funding from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Such programs now face a funding gap that may be insurmountable in the short term, and many will likely shutter.
As the rate of child recruitment continues to soar, Colombia’s government, security forces, and international partners must prioritize what Tumi told me was his goal: “Get the kids out of this war.” Bogotá must scale up protection and economic opportunities for young people, pressure armed groups on the issue of child recruitment at the negotiating table, and help rescued children recover and reintegrate into society. It is time to deny Colombia’s armed and criminal groups the kids they rely on to exert control.
Child recruitment has long been a part of Colombia’s internal conflict. State prosecutors have found that before laying down arms in 2016, the FARC had recruited nearly 19,000 minors over two decades. Other armed groups, such the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), which remains active, have recruited minors, too. Right-wing paramilitaries, which demobilized in the early 2000s, had recruited at least 2,800 children over roughly a decade.
In the initial years after the Colombian government and the FARC signed the 2016 peace agreement, child recruitment fell precipitously, to just several dozen reported new cases a year. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Children in rural Colombia were out of school for 18 months or longer, leaving them without educational opportunities, social stimulation, and safe spaces. Teachers in Colombia are often best positioned to detect whether a child has been recruited, as they notice and report when a child stops coming to class. Without those protections, the armed groups swept in. “The recruiters have a repertoire of tools,” Tumi told me. “They offer them economic opportunities and adventure.”
Late last year, I interviewed more than a dozen children who had either been recruited and subsequently rescued or resisted a recruitment attempt. Girls, who are sought out about as often as boys, often receive tailor-made pitches from recruiters. One teenager said she was drawn in by the promise of escaping from a violent home and “being able to move around, from here to there—to be free.” When she was in the group, other girls told her they came expecting fancy cars, nice clothes, and rich boyfriends. A female indigenous leader who tracks recruitment says girls have been offered everything from women’s leadership training to all-expenses-paid cosmetic surgeries. Boys are told they will earn fast cash, with access to motorcycles, cellphones, and girls. Many jump at the chance without understanding the implications. “Sometimes as a young person, you act without thinking,” Tumi told me. “You put one foot, then two feet, in the water, and suddenly there is no way out.”
Bogotá must scale up protection and economic opportunities for young people.
Recruitment can happen anywhere. Often, the first contact comes over social media. TikTok is rife with videos posted by armed groups depicting the perks of life in the rank and file: parties in clubs, designer clothes, heavy weapons, and new Toyota trucks. The pitch is harder to resist when it comes from a known contact such as a neighbor or classmate, as happens frequently in Cauca. “The groups maintain a presence outside of schools, with their fancy cars, motorcycles, and booze, to show kids the ‘good life,’” the indigenous leader who tracks recruitment told me. Six school rectors in northern Cauca received death threats last year when they tried to limit who could enter school zones.
The state ombudsman’s office told me it now maps not just Colombia’s infamous drug trafficking corridors but also the paths that recruiters use for trafficking kids. Children taken from northern Cauca end up in half a dozen different armed groups across the country. In May 2024, soldiers stopped a van from Cauca filled with about 40 recruited children destined for Guaviare. Over the course of a year from mid-2023 to 2024, the military recovered roughly 75 children in Arauca, along the border with Venezuela; most of them were from Cauca, more than 700 miles away.
Some recruiters are members of a particular armed group. Others are independent smugglers who shop the child victim around. “Every child has a price,” Tumi told me. “The price is higher or lower depending on their characteristics.” Boys sell for around $120; pretty girls for more than four times that amount. Military officials confirmed this account, adding that anyone who manages to bring in a child recruit is paid a portion of their sale price. Indigenous authorities have also recorded cases in which children negotiate their own exit from an armed group by promising that they will recruit three or four of their friends to take their place.
In northern Cauca, child recruitment became part of a broader strategy of intimidation by the dominant armed group, the Dagoberto Ramos Front, which was founded after the 2016 peace accord by former FARC members who abandoned the reintegration process. The group is suspected of assassinating the majority of the more than 133 indigenous social leaders killed in northern Cauca between 2016 and 2024. In the same region, the armed group buys coca and marijuana crops and funds public works; many residents are dependent on the group for income. “They build new roads, pay for people’s health care, and offer jobs,” one indigenous elder told me. “The message to the community is, ‘We are the ones who help, not the traditional authorities.’” The Colombian government has never had a real presence in these remote areas, and the state does not currently have the resources to maintain security and regular services.
In the resulting vacuum, northern Cauca has seen no fewer than 850 cases of child recruitment just in the last five years, according to indigenous authorities. For an armed group to sustain its operations, it needs foot soldiers to intimidate the population, watch over territory, and keep an eye out for enemies. “Recruiting children is pure income generation for the groups, because they need to control vast areas,” a military commander told me. “If before they had three groups of troops, they could control three areas. With kids, they can have hundreds of troops and control hundreds of areas.” But taking minors is not just about amassing troops. It also crushes community resistance and keeps families quiet. Mothers and fathers whose children are missing are unlikely to speak out against an armed group, fearing that their remaining sons and daughters will pay the price.
Within the ranks of armed groups, children perform every manner of task. Perhaps the most vital to the groups is what Tumi described as providing “the curtain”—a perimeter of expendable troops that protect the core leadership and fighters. Children I interviewed described receiving very little training before being handed their first gun. “You see kids carrying weapons bigger than they are,” a colleague of Tumi’s told me. Children are sent to patrol remote areas for days without food or supplies.
Other recruits serve the commanders by cooking, washing dishes, and performing other chores. Many are sexually abused. One 14-year-old girl who gave her testimony to community elders said that, once inside the group, she quickly realized that the best way to minimize her suffering was to become close to the commander, who used her as he wished but at least prevented others from forcing themselves on her—unless they paid him. “They take the girls to very remote places, where they are sold for their bodies,” a female elder told me. “They either grow accustomed to this part of war, or they die there.”
Each year, dozens of children try to escape. In December, the Colombian military found mass graves with the remains of children who had been recruited. Indigenous community leaders said some of them had been known runaways who had managed to contact their families or local authorities and were awaiting help. They were almost certainly killed as punishment for escaping—a common practice meant to deter others from doing the same.
Since President Gustavo Petro took office in 2022, his administration has tried to negotiate peace—or at least de-escalation—with an array of armed and criminal groups. Ending child recruitment is a priority for Bogotá. But after more than two years of attempting dialogue, armed groups still refuse to talk about releasing kids.
All armed and criminal groups across Colombia have minors in their ranks, but the problem is most pronounced within the largest remaining historical insurgency, the ELN and dissidents of the former FARC. Initial discussions with the ELN about children stalled when the group rejected the suggestion that it forcibly recruits, arguing that minors aged 14 and older are capable of voluntary decisions. Negotiations between the state and the group are currently frozen.
Conversations advanced further with a FARC dissident group known as the Estado Mayor Central, of which the Dagoberto Ramos Front in Cauca is a part. The group’s leaders signed a bilateral cease-fire with the state in October 2023 that vowed to protect the rights of children. But according to the state ombudsman, local communities, and security forces, the group’s commanders continued to draw in recruits. In March 2024, Petro called off a cease-fire with the EMC in Cauca and other areas with a known presence of child recruits, leading to the eventual dissolution of the EMC into various factions, only one of which remains in talks.
The government’s failure to negotiate an end to child recruitment suggests that the administration has not put sufficient pressure on armed and criminal groups to address the issue. Bogotá must ensure that future cease-fire deals or other agreements include specific commitments to conduct a census of child combatants, make a plan for their release, and end recruitment. Armed groups will be reluctant to agree because they rely heavily on minors for tactical strength and fear that releasing children could make them appear weak vis-à-vis their criminal rivals. To mitigate these concerns and to avoid stigmatizing kids who are freed, the government could suggest a discreet process of demobilization and not publicize its progress immediately. State prosecutors could also prioritize investigations into serial recruiters and swiftly bring cases to trial.
Stronger efforts to prevent children from joining armed groups and to help those who escape find a path back to childhood are essential, too. Compared to what is needed, a regional military commander told me, the state has done “nothing, nothing, nothing.” Communities have asked for more safe spaces for children, ways to fill their free time, and more police protection around schools. Schools must also provide children better education about the war; many child recruits are lured in without any knowledge of the reality of life in an armed group. Furthermore, the state needs a more comprehensive offer of services to protect and rehabilitate children who escape or are recovered from armed groups. Many girls are ostracized after they return, labeled the ex-girlfriends of armed men. Other kids are at acute risk of being recruited again—or being killed in retaliation for leaving.
Future cease-fire deals should include specific commitments to end child recruitment.
The U.S. State Department and USAID were among the largest funders of community programs to prevent child recruitment, until support abruptly stopped in January. In September 2023, the State Department had chosen Colombia as a focus country for ending recruitment and signed the U.S.-Colombia Child Protection Compact, which included $10 million for projects such as law enforcement action to catch traffickers, trauma care for victims, and a comprehensive survey of risks to children, including recruitment. That came on top of the assistance USAID has delivered for more than a decade to projects that provide safe after-school spaces and help former fighters reintegrate into civilian life. The departure of that critical support leaves communities such as Tumi’s more exposed. Bogotá must dedicate sufficient resources to these initiatives, and in the absence of aid from the United States, other international donors, such as Canada and the European Union, should step in to fill the gap.
Halting child recruitment is more than a moral mission. It is a way to debilitate armed and criminal groups that rely on cheap recruits to maintain their control. The United States should reconsider ending its lifesaving work, recognizing that stopping these recruitment tactics is vital to Washington’s stated goal of combating drug trafficking. Meanwhile, Bogotá must help communities resist the pressure on their sons and daughters by providing basic services and protections, the absence of which criminal recruiters are able to exploit. Protecting Colombia’s children would deal a strategic blow to armed groups, which Tumi knew all too well. “The armed groups want to kill us because we refuse to participate,” he told me, “because we deny them what they need.”
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