‘They began taking my friends from school’: the children being recruited by Colombia’s armed groups

Militias are coercing, bribing and kidnapping young people in remote areas to be fighters, drug sellers, informants or sex slaves

In spring last year, Ana’s* friends began to disappear. Members of an armed group had begun recruiting children in her village in Colombia’s north-west region of Norte de Santander, promising them food, money, mobile phones and motorcycles.

“They began taking all of the young people, the boys and the girls, my friends from school. I was so scared, I had to shut myself away,” says Ana, then 14.

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