Former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) commanders have for the first time in Colombian history freely admitted the armed group’s role in recruiting more than 18,677 children during five decades of their armed conflict with the state.
In a five-page document signed by Rodrigo Londoño, alias ‘Timochenko’, and five other demobilized senior leaders, the former fighters recognized their role in forcing minors into a life under arms.
Colombia’s peace court, known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), had previously determined that the six defendants, all former members of the FARC secretariat, carried responsibility for the crimes of recruitment of minors under 15 years of age, mistreatment torture and murder of children, sexual and reproductive violence, and prejudice against minors with diverse sexual orientations or gender identities.
See also: Peace plan has caused more conflict, says thinktank.
In the letter to the court the six defendants admitted the acts and asked for forgiveness.
“There are no words to repair these deeds,” said Londoño in a televised address widely circulated this week. “Today with honesty and clarity we recognize our role.”
“We ask forgiveness from direct and indirect victims, and from society in general.”
Londoño, who was the FARC’s last field commander up until the peace signing, said he recognized that the rebel’s actions had “stolen childhoods” as young combatants faced constant fear and death.
Historical whitewashing
Londoño also acknowledged that “the homicides, forced abortions, acts of gender-based violence, and reproductive violence caused serious physical and psychological damage that still persists”.
The statement was a milestone in Case 07 of Colombia’s JEP, the special court charged with untangling crimes committed by all sides during the state conflict with the FARC.
Case 07 was opened in 2019 and has since officially recognized 18,677 victims, of which 54 per cent are children themselves recruited, and 46 per cent families who lost children to the conflict.
Other actors in Colombia’s armed conflict have used minors as well. According to Crisis Group, “right-wing paramilitary groups” counted some 2,800 children within their ranks when they demobilized in the mid-2000s.
Historically the FARC whitewashed their role in the recruitment of minors, and during the 2016 peace process vigorously denied accusations of abducting children or threatening families to hand over their children.
According to the FARC’s own narrative, many young recruits joining the Marxist guerrilla group were “volunteers escaping poverty”. The leadership traditionally downplayed reports of sexual abuse, forced abortions and the murders and disappearances of children as political propaganda.
As recently as 2015, FARC commanders were claiming that the armed group “under no circumstance recruited children, or anyone else, forcefully,” according to a Human Rights Watch report critical of the guerrilla’s position.
Never coming home
HRW’s own investigations had identified victims as young as 12 who were tied up by the guerrillas and threatened to be killed if they tried to resist. In other cases, kids were tricked with offers of presents or cash before being forced to fight under arms.
The report also cited cases of older commanders abusing girls as young as 12 in some incidents forcing them to use contraception or to have abortions.
According to JEP data presented under Case 07, child victims were present in the FARC ranks across 16 departments of Colombia, almost the whole territory controlled by the guerrilla group at its peak. Recruitment peaked between 1999 and 2013 but continued to 2016, the year of the peace accord between the rebels and the state.
Accredited to the case were 2,000 individual victims recruited as children but now adults, the JEP announced this week.
Also part of the group were families of 485 children recruited into the ranks who “never returned home”. The JEP had joined with the UPBD (Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas) missing persons unit to try and locate the remains of those missing persons.
Details from Case 07 also highlighted the large numbers of minors taken from indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, with 9,000 registered victims from six ethnic groups.
Restorative Justice
JEP spokesperson Viviana Pineda told The Bogotá Post that FARC leaders’ statements this week were an important step forward in the restorative justice process.
“This opens up spaces for encounters between perpetrators and victims,” she said. Case 07 was still in the dialogue phase with both private and public audiences were expected in the future where victims would given the opportunity to recount their experiences.
The former FARC leaders, though not necessarily implicated as individuals, were seen as the strategists of the policies that led to abuses. On this basis they should respond to the crimes in front of the victims.
“The former secretariat can sincerely recognize their role and the damage caused, and tell the truth, and through this can access a restorative sanction,” she said.
This might mean an eight-year sentence of “restricted liberties” for the former FARC leaders, though not jail time. As part of the sentence they might be tasked to work in “restorative programs” – a form of social work – in agreements made with the victims.
For its part, the former FARC secretariat announced its full support for the cases moving forward. In a taped statement former commander Julián Galló also accepted his role in the crimes.
“Our compromise is to work in the future so that hopefully these cases don’t keep on occurring,” he said.
Circular problem
Repetition was already happening, according to a report published last month by Crisis Group called Kids on the Front Lines: Stopping Child Recruitment in Colombia. According to the Brussels-based think tank, the practice had “boomed in the last decade” even since the FARC demobilized under the peace process in 2016.
A new generation of armed groups still relied on minors to maintain territorial control, said the report, with 620 cases reported in 2024: “Children carry out high-risk tasks, suffer abuse, and are punished with death if caught escaping.”
Ruthless gangs were using social media posts to reel vulnerable youngsters into the conflict with false promises of wealth, status and protection, said Crisis Group. Families faced reprisals if they spoke out, the report added.
And with increased competition between fractionated armed groups, minors were being pushed to the front lines: “Kids now fight in high-risk combat roles.”
Colombia’s circular problem of child recruitment was highlighted this week by JEP magistrate Lily Rueda, presiding over Case 07, in conversation with El Espectador. The message from the peace courts was “more relevant then ever” after data from UNICEF showed that the recruitment of children in Colombia had increased by 300% in the last five years.
“This is an opportunity to reiterate our commitment to investigating and prosecuting these acts of violence against children, which constitute war crimes and are not subject to amnesty, not even in the context of peace agreements,” she said
“Victims who survived recruitment in the past should not be victimized again by the recruitment of their own sons and daughters in the present day.”