Colombia Children Wage Guerrilla War

C H I A, Colombia, Sept. 17, 2003 -- Jimmy leans against the fence, his arm on the post. The 17-year-old tries to sound confident, but as his story of horror unfolds, he voice becomes more tentative.

"The worst thing for me," he says, his eyes focused on the ground, "was when my girlfriend and child were killed by police."

Jimmy was 14 when that happened. His girlfriend was the same age. Their baby was just a month old.

Then he leans down to pull up the pant leg of his jeans. "I have two scars here," he says, pointing to his left leg and then to his right, "and I was also shot here above my knee."

The scars and the memories are Jimmy's constant reminder of his former life as a child soldier. When he was 13, Jimmy ran away from his home in Nariño in southern Colombia to join guerrillas fighting government forces. He became an expert at making land mines and car bombs that were used to kill Colombian soldiers.

According to a report released this week by Human Rights Watch, Jimmy's story is typical of the experiences of the estimated 11,000 Colombian children who have been recruited to fight on the front lines of the 40-year-old guerrilla war against the Colombian government.

Impressionable children are the biggest source of recruits for the guerrilla armies. As many as half of the rebel soldiers are under the age of 18. Most join voluntarily, to escape lives of abject poverty and family abuse.

But what they escape to isn't any better. The report chronicles devastating accounts of exploitation, abuse, torture and murder. Children who try to escape are often killed. The children who stay are often the first to die in battles with the Colombian army and police.

With the Colombian government's newfound determination to crush the rebel groups, more and more children like Jimmy are risking death and abandoning their lives as soldiers as they discover there is a way out.

With a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development and other funding from the United Nations, the Colombian government operates a network of 46 safe houses, which are home to almost 600 former child soldiers. In the next three months, the number of children escaping from the guerrillas and turning to the government for help is expected to double.

The Colombian Ministry of Family Welfare is scrambling to double the number of safe houses and straining to find the funds to get those homes established and open.

The program is an important component of Colombia's effort to defeat the guerrillas who have terrorized this country for so many years, making it one of the most dangerous places on Earth: There are 3,000 kidnappings a year, 10,000 murders a year. The nation is home to three left- and right-wing guerrilla groups that will go to any length to maintain control of the drug trade — source of 90 percent of the cocaine that ends up on American streets.

Childhood Lost

It seems too hard to reconcile the stories of abuse with the picture of Jimmy and 19 other kids at work and at play at the idyllic shelter they now call home. There is soccer on the grass, they take literacy classes and some even learn how to act. At sunrise they work in the garden, learn to milk cows and care for the barnyard full of animals. Jimmy is in charge of feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs.

Jimmy recognizes that his childhood is lost: "What kind of childhood do you think I could have carrying a gun and a vest and equipment? That's not childhood."

Like Jimmy, all of the children here are trying to salvage what they can of their future.

All have abandoned their lives as guerrillas. They have been brought to a safe house an hour outside of Bogota, to salvage what they can of their future. It seems somehow fitting that this was once the home of a prominent Colombian drug lord.

Monika, 17, is toiling in the market garden, chatting incessantly with a boy nearby. She joined the guerrillas voluntarily, thinking they offered her a life of freedom.

She quickly discovered the reality: a grueling life constantly on the run in the jungle.

"We lived in the mountains in places really far away from the towns," she says. "We would sleep in tents or under trees. We were always afraid out there, we didn't know if we were going to live or die."

But for Monika and the other girls it is often much worse. About a third of the child soldiers are young girls, some just 8 and 9 years old. Many are sexually exploited.

"The commander wanted to sexually abuse me," says Monika nervously, "and I didn't let him and that is why [I] was punished. They punished me with hard labor. That is one of the reasons I deserted."

Stories of Torture

Jimmy points to scars around his fingernails and a slash on his unusable left thumb. He describes how police tortured him as they tried to get him to reveal to the location of the jungle camp where his comrades were hiding.

"During the interrogation, when they tortured me, they broke my arm and the stuck pins under my fingernails and they cut one of my fingers," he says. "That night I took the officer's knife and slit his throat and escaped."

These are difficult stories for anyone to hear, but Jose Miguel Vivanco knows them well. He is the executive director for the Americas for Human Rights Watch. Researchers for the organization interviewed 112 former child combatants across Colombia. Their stories were remarkably similar.

"I am not trying to justify their crimes," says Vivanco, "but they are kids. For them it is sometimes even difficult to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. They are now in a different situation and I think they should have a chance to rehabilitate themselves, to receive proper treatment and to try to play a decent role in society."

And that is the role of the safe houses — to provide a haven for child soldiers caught in an adult war.