Colombian drug gangs and rebel groups are increasingly recruiting children and training them for dangerous roles, including piloting drones loaded with explosives, Human Rights Watch said in a report published Monday.The rights watchdog said armed groups were using social media to lure children as they expanded their control over rural areas where they profit from drug trafficking, extortion and illegal mining.“Armed groups in Colombia are recruiting children with impunity,” Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch told news agency AP, warning that weak protection systems and social media platforms were making recruitment easier.
Child recruitment is rising again
At least 1,500 children have been recruited by armed groups in Colombia since 2021, according to the country’s Human Rights Defenders’ Office. Of those cases, 625 were reported in 2024 alone.Child recruitment had declined after Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, helped reduce violence in several parts of the country. But recruitment has risen again as smaller rebel factions and criminal organisations have fought to seize control of rural territories abandoned by FARC fighters.Armed groups have historically used children as messengers, cooks and intelligence gatherers, and sometimes forced them to engage with rival groups. Girls have also faced sexual abuse by commanders.But HRW said the role of recruited children was changing as armed groups increasingly turned to drones equipped with explosives. The drones have been used to attack rival groups as well as police and military bases.HRW said it had verified social media videos showing children operating explosive-laden drones and had interviewed family protection officers who work with children who escaped or were demobilised from armed groups.Some children who later left the groups said commanders had presented operating drones as a game rather than as participation in armed combat, the report said.The scale of drone attacks has also grown. Colombia’s Human Rights Defenders’ Office recorded 121 drone attacks by armed groups in the first five months of this year, killing 21 people and injuring 145.
Social media becomes a recruitment tool
HRW identified dozens of social media accounts that portrayed life with rebel groups in a positive light, an issue that the United Nations has also previously raised.The watchdog said algorithms on platforms including Meta and TikTok appeared in some cases to promote content that encouraged children to join armed groups.Meta and TikTok told HRW that their platforms prohibit content promoting violence and said they had removed accounts flagged by the organisation.The FARC dissident faction led by commander Ivan Mordisco was involved in most of the child-recruitment cases identified by HRW, with particularly heavy recruitment reported in Colombia’s Cauca region.The impact has been especially severe on Indigenous communities. Nearly half of the child-recruitment cases recorded by Colombian authorities since 2021 involved Indigenous children, even though Indigenous people account for only about 4% of the country’s population. Girls represented 40% of all recruited children.HRW urged the Colombian government to devote more resources to prosecuting those who recruit children and strengthen protection systems in vulnerable rural areas. It also called on social media companies to make it easier for users to report recruitment content and preserve evidence that could help prosecutors.
