The conflict in Colombia has spanned more than six decades as the governmentās forces and paramilitary groups have been fighting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Peopleās Liberation Army (ELN). The current conflict began in 1964 when the left-wing guerrilla movements, known in Spanish as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN), emerged to oppose the conservative government. What has ensued since then has been a long and bitter conflict. Much of the countryās rugged geography including the tall Andean mountains, Amazonian jungle and two coastlines have been controlled by the various armed groups who have struggled to gain control over land and the countryās lucrative resources including gold, bananas, coal, oil, emeralds and palm oil. Much of the violence has taken place in rural areas where the presence of the armed groups has been the most dominant (Arroyave and Erazo-Coronado 2016). Dirty warfare has been used and civilians, particularly the rural poor, have been subject to much violence as armed groups have tried to get rid of those who dissent against them. Threats, torture, assassinations and massacres of whole communities have led to the displacement of more than 6.8 million Colombians, generating the worldās second largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) after Syria (Human Rights Watch 2017).
Much of the violence in Colombia can be attributed to the failure of the state to ensure justice and equality in a context of poor economic reform, drug trafficking and conflict over land and natural resources. As a result, violence has run like a thread not only through the countryās official history but also through the personal histories of most Colombians. As Steven Dudley (2004) observed, there is not a Colombian who does not have a story of mutilation, massacre or flight to tell. One of the most noteworthy aspects of the Colombian conflict has been its use of children. They have been a persistent feature in Colombiaās various armed groups and have operated as soldiers, spies and drug traffickers with almost as many girls fighting in the armed groups as there have been boys. While Colombia has begun to move forwards with a peace process, many of the younger generations have been involved in conflict as āchild soldiersā. This book is focused on the FARC, its recruitment of children, and how they have been made to become part of Colombiaās guerrilla groups.
During my fieldwork, discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, I spent six months beginning in 2015 working in a demobilisation centre for former child soldiers. I then spent the next six months in 2016 travelling through various parts of Colombia speaking with various people who had been directly involved with the conflict, as well as with many civilians. The children I met in Colombia had a remarkable awareness about the Colombian conflict and its dynamics. As I came to learn, this was largely because the war has been fought all around them; it has been fought near their homes and next to their schools. They have had family members who have been either involved with one of the armed groups or affected by the violence from the armed groups. They have served as soldiers for the various armed groups in the country, worked as drug mules for the narco-traffickers and have operated as spies and urban militia for the various armed groups. UNICEF (2016) reports that out of 7.6 million people in Colombia who are registered as victims of the conflict, 2.5 million or 1 in 3 are children. Nearly 45,000 children have been killed and 2.3 million have been displaced. Since 1999, nearly 6000 children have run away from non-state armed groups or were released by the military and received state protection (UNICEF 2016). Of these, one in six were from Afro-Colombian or indigenous communities and 30% were girls (UNICEF 2016). The average age of recruitment into armed groups is 13 (UNICEF 2016). In some parts of Colombia, children have played such a frequent role in the conflict, that police assumed that all children were involved with one of the armed groups. Eduard, a lawyer from Apartado, Uraba, a region that had been heavily affected by the conflict, explained that when he was growing up not more than three or four children were allowed to be on the street. āIf you said you were from Uraba then the police would kill you straight away because they would think that you are working for the guerrillasā, he remembered.
One of the most interesting aspects of child recruitment in Colombia is that a large majority of the children who have joined armed groups in Colombia have done so by choice. In many cases, this has occurred after children have come into contact with active members of one of the armed groups or because they have been encouraged to join by a family member or friends who are already in one of the armed groups. However, in a context such as Colombia, the extent to which children have had full agency in the decisions that they have made should be questioned. The overwhelming poverty and inequality throughout the country have meant that many children have made the choice to join an armed group as a means of gaining better access to resources and protection. There are regions of Colombia where children openly and insistently request to join the guerrillas as a way of escaping poverty. There have also been reported cases where even the mothers themselves, desperate for their children to have a better economic situation, ask for their children to be recruited. Thus, most of the children who are recruited into the armed groups come from the most disadvantaged and vulnerable parts of society. With few other options, joining an armed group may seem the only means of survival. Children have also joined armed groups for revenge and there have been cases of forced recruitment. It is therefore important to realise that voluntary recruitment must always be understood in relation to the options that a child may have in such a context (Steinl 2017).
This book is not so much concerned with why children join armed groups. There is already significant research exploring the many reasons that children become involved with armed groups globally, which will be explored in greater depth in Chapter 2. Instead, book is more concerned with how children become involved with armed groups and how they take on the identity of those groups. More research is needed to look at what happens to children once they enter into armed groups and how they come to take on the particular identities of the armed groups. This book is concerned with the ways in which children are militarised. Militarisation is understood as a process of becoming and being a soldier, a process that is shaped by the structural forces and dynamics of the broader socio-historical context in which it is taking place (Denov 2010). This typically involves a transition process. Cynthia Enloe (2002), who has written extensively on militarisation, argues that militarisation is a transformative process whereby a person or society gradually comes to be controlled by military institutions and ideas. Everyday life structures become integrated with military practices and violence becomes increasingly normalised. Enloe argues that militarism is an ideology, a compilation of assumptions, in which specific values are taught about what is good, right and wrong in relation to military values. These usually come through the concerted decisions made by groups of individuals who are pursuing specific interests and goals in relation to their military objectives. These beliefs and values are usually constructed in relation to specific cultural and social values (Enloe 2014).
The way in which the military values are transferred is also highly dependent on the cultural environment and may occur, as Lutz (2004) argues, through the use of popular culture to influence the idea that the military is central to the state. National histories may be shaped in ways that glorify and legitimate military action and symbols. Militarism is therefore often a complex mix of politics, friendship, money, career advancement and idealisms where individuals take on military practices and beliefs that are specific to the social and cultural environment in which they are taking place. Angstrom (2016) argues that crossing the boundary between being a civilian and a soldier means transitioning from one state to another, where a new set of rules, expectations and roles apply. Once the person has crossed the boundary from being a civilian into being a soldier, they are then expected to understand that they must behave differently and even see themselves in a different way. In Western militaries, this process has been well theorised by Goffman (1987) who argues that training barracks can be likened to factories that are set to remould civilian humans into soldiers. Militarisation is therefore the process of moving between different spheres of social reality where the values, norms and ideas differ. Understanding these processes is significant for understanding reintegration processes. Bringing children out of war and successfully bringing them back into the civilian world involve understanding what brought these children into the armed group in the first place. This means understanding these processes of militarisation.
These processes of militarisation cannot be assumed to be th...