Every 20 hours, somewhere in Colombia, a child vanishes into the ranks of an illegal armed group. That is the grim calculation released this week by UNICEF and the United Nations, which warn that the forced recruitment of minors has surged to levels not seen in decades, undermining Colombia’s efforts to contain its internal conflict.
The report, published on World Children’s Day and marking the anniversary of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, claims that more than 1,200 children and adolescents have been recruited in the last five years. According to the U.N., the practice has risen 300 percent since 2019, with a steep 64 percent jump between 2023 and 2024 alone. In the first ten months of 2025, Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office registered 162 new cases – though the numbers is likely much higher.
“These numbers should horrify us,” said Tanya Chapuisat, UNICEF’s representative in Colombia. “They are not just statistics. They are children taken from their homes, their schools, their communities — used to carry weapons, gather intelligence, or exploited in ways no child should ever face.”
For many families, reporting a child’s disappearance is unthinkable. Fear of retaliation is overwhelming, particularly in remote Indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories where state institutions are scarce and illegal armed groups exert full control. “What is happening is extremely serious,” said Iris Marín, Colombia’s national ombudsman. “Parents tell us, ‘If I report it, they will come back for my other children.’ How can any mother step forward under such threats?”
That silence means most cases remain unrecorded – one reason the United Nations insists its figure of 1,200 children over five years represents only “a fraction” of a crisis spreading across some of Colombia’s most isolated and neglected regions.
At the center of the surge is the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), the largest faction of FARC dissidents, under command of alias ‘Iván Mordisco’. The EMC controls drug-trafficking corridors in the southwest and along of the porous 1,800-kilometer border with Venezuela. According to the U.N., the group is responsible for roughly 40 percent of all verified child recruitment cases, using minors to transport weapons, staff checkpoints, cultivate coca crops, and, increasingly, to fight. Girls face even greater risks: many are subjected to sexual violence or forced relationships with combatants. Others are killed for attempting to flee.
Unlike earlier periods of the conflict, today’s recruitment crisis is driven less by ideology than by the expansion of lucrative criminal economies – cocaine trafficking, illegal mining, extortion – that demand a steady supply of young, disposable labor. Children living in deep poverty are easily coerced with promises of money, food, or protection. Others are abducted outright.
The departments with the highest number of cases – Cauca, Nariño, Chocó, Arauca and Norte de Santander – are also those where the state is weakest and armed groups have consolidated territorial control. The Pacific coast, plagued by violent disputes between the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla and Gulf Clan cartel, has seen a particularly sharp spike. In Cauca alone, authorities have recorded 37 minors forcibly recruited this year. Antioquia registered 20 cases; Chocó 16; Nariño 13; Huila 11; and Norte de Santander 8. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities account for more than half of all victims in the last two years.
UNICEF and the Canadian Government, which co-sponsored this year’s report, called for urgent action not only from the state but from schools, civil society and the private sector. “The State must strengthen prevention and protection,” Ms. Chapuisat said. “Schools and employers must create more opportunities. The best way to prevent recruitment is to allow children to enjoy their rights.”
Canada’s Ambassador to Colombia, Elizabeth Williams, said the rising figures reflect a crisis too often hidden from national debate. “No child should be forced into war – not for ideology, not for economics,” she said. “We cannot allow this to remain invisible.”
To pierce that silence, UNICEF and the Canadian Embassy launched a new campaign, “Desarma tu Indiferencia” – “Disarm Your Indifference.” The initiative highlights what recruitment leaves behind: the empty desk in a classroom, the bed that stays cold at dawn, the household routines quietly abandoned. The campaign’s message is blunt: child recruitment is neither inevitable nor distant, and ending it requires collective and sustained attention.
For thousands of families in some of Colombia’s hardest-hit conflict zones, the suffering remains intensely personal. “Parents live in permanent uncertainty,” Ms. Chapuisat said. “They do not know if their children are alive, if they have eaten, if they will ever return home.”
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