BOGOTA, COLOMBIA – A damning new report released Monday by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has exposed a sharp, alarming resurgence in the recruitment of children by drug trafficking gangs and breakaway rebel factions across Colombia, with minors now being trained to carry out high-risk, lethal operations including piloting explosive-laden drones. The international human rights watchdog documents that criminal networks have increasingly turned to social media platforms as a fertile recruiting ground, as they battle to seize control of remote rural territories where they generate billions in illegal revenue from drug trafficking, extortion, and unregulated artisanal mining.
“Armed groups in Colombia are recruiting children with complete impunity,” stated Juanita Goebertus, HRW’s Americas Division Director. “Colombia’s child protection systems are failing vulnerable communities, and social media platforms have emerged as a far more effective recruiting tool than any traditional tactic these groups have used before.”
The troubling trend reverses years of progress that followed Colombia’s landmark 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel insurgency. That agreement dramatically reduced nationwide violence and cut rates of child recruitment for nearly a decade after FARC guerrillas demobilized and withdrew from contested rural areas. However, the power vacuum left by FARC’s exit has drawn a patchwork of smaller rebel holdouts, splinter factions, and drug cartels, which are now fighting violent territorial wars in regions where state law enforcement and social support infrastructure remain severely underdeveloped.
Data from Colombia’s own national Human Rights Defenders’ Office confirms the accelerating crisis: at least 1,500 children have been forcibly or coercively recruited by armed groups since 2021, with 625 new cases reported in the first half of 2024 alone. That number already surpasses the peak annual recruitment count of 1,320 recorded in 1999, at the height of Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict between the military and FARC, according to data from the country’s National Truth Commission.
Historically, armed groups in Colombia have deployed recruited children for low-stakes supporting roles including carrying messages, gathering intelligence on military movements, cooking for combat units, and frontline skirmishes. Girls are frequently targeted for sexual exploitation by group commanders, a longstanding abuse that persists today. But HRW’s investigation confirms a dangerous new evolution of the crisis: minors are now being actively trained in drone warfare, as armed groups increasingly rely on remotely piloted explosive devices to attack rival factions, police outposts, and military bases.
HRW researchers verified multiple public social media videos showing children operating explosive-laden drones, and conducted interviews with family protection officers who work directly with children that have escaped armed groups or participated in government demobilization programs. The report notes that armed groups deliberately manipulate child recruits, framing drone operation as a recreational game rather than a deadly act of armed conflict to reduce resistance.
Colombian government data underscores the growing lethality of drone attacks: between January and May 2024, armed groups carried out 121 drone strikes across the country, leaving 21 people dead and 145 more injured.
The report also highlights the key role of social media in modern recruitment, echoing longstanding warnings first raised by the United Nations. HRW researchers identified dozens of public social media accounts that deliberately glorify life in rebel and criminal groups, framing participation as an attractive, glamorous lifestyle to vulnerable children in marginalized rural communities. In many cases, the algorithms powering major platforms including Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok actively amplified this harmful content, pushing it to child users’ feeds and expanding its reach, the investigation found.
In responses to HRW’s inquiry, both Meta and TikTok stated that their community policies prohibit content that promotes organized violence and child recruitment, and confirmed that they had removed all accounts flagged by the human rights organization. Still, the persistent spread of this content points to ongoing gaps in platform enforcement.
The investigation also identifies the Ivan Mordisco faction, a FARC holdout group that rejected the 2016 peace accord, as the worst perpetrator of child recruitment, with most of its activity concentrated in Colombia’s southwestern Cauca region. A key demographic analysis from HRW found that despite Indigenous people making up just 4% of Colombia’s total population, nearly half of all child recruitment cases recorded since 2021 involved Indigenous children, leaving this already marginalized community disproportionately impacted by the crisis. Girls also account for 40% of all recruited minors, the data shows.
HRW has issued two key sets of recommendations to address the growing crisis. First, the organization is calling on the Colombian national government to allocate additional funding and resources to prosecute armed group members who recruit children, while expanding prevention programs and social services in high-risk rural areas to protect vulnerable minors. As of Monday, the Colombian government had not issued a public response to the report’s findings. Second, HRW is urging social media platforms to create simple, accessible reporting channels for users to flag content linked to child recruitment, and to preserve content and account data that can be used as evidence in criminal prosecutions of recruiters.