Children, Education, and Conflict in Colombia.

As in war zones throughout the world, children have been disprortionately affected by the conflict in Colombia.

Article researched and written by Marieth Arzuza & Valentina San Juan.

No one can deny that Colombia's long-running armed conflict is the primary source of human rights violations in the country. Indeed, it has been more than 40 years in which the Colombian civil population has dealt with the consequences of its broken social fabric. Such an armed conflict has condemned a country to economic, political and social underdevelopment. A scenario in which the opportunities of more than 13 generations of Colombians have been frustrated by the war. However, such underdevelopment cannot be generalized, but the impact on the most vulnerable population communities in the country should be emphasized: rural areas and children. Although the reconstruction of the social fabric began through different projects following the 2016 Peace Agreement between the FARC and the Santos government, rural communities continue to face a longstanding form of violence: state abandonment. Furthermore, according to Wald (2014):

"The armed conflict, for the most part, has been of a rural nature; and, secondly, rural education has been a subject that has been very much neglected by education research and needs to be thought about even more when we see that today rural areas themselves continue to experience new forms of conflict, what some have called the new conflictivities."

The importance of these new conflictivities falls not only on current generations of Colombians, but also on future ones. This, in the long term, condemns society to the same vicious circles of violence in the country. According to Wald (2014), “rural education has been abandoned by the State, the policies it has put in place for rural education have remained in words because the type of rurality of the country is unknown”. In this sense, it is easy to imagine the consequences of State abandonment in the territories. However, it is “difficult to imagine the impact that the game of war has had on the children and adolescents who participate in it” (Chávez, Falla and Romero, 2008). It is for this reason that this article discusses the importance of recognizing rural education as a necessary tool to end the cycles of violence in areas of armed conflict in Colombia. The text wants to demonstrate that rural education is such an important tool since it takes away from the hands of violent groups, many boys, and girls who may otherwise grow up with the logic of violence in their social, family, and even school environments.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the dynamics of war within the same territory have the particularity of affecting all the social spheres of a state, trampling over endless human rights. In Colombia, “education has been subjected to the logic of armed conflict, putting the lives of students and teachers in danger” (Jaramillo, 2012).

This can be evidenced in that, in Colombia, the Observatory of Memory and Conflict of the CNMH reported that between 1958 and 2018 throughout the country, 1,579 teachers have been direct victims of the armed conflict, and 1,063 (67.3%) have suffered selective assassinations. Furthermore, 201 (12.7%) teachers suffered kidnappings, and 200 (12.6%), disappearances (Martinez, 2022).

The right to education of thousands of Colombian children and young people is being impeded by the violent acts perpetrated by irregular armed actors and their clashes with state forces. Besides, as Jaramillo (2012) states, “in the seven departments where the law and order situation is most critical, 66 per cent of young people do not have access to secondary education”. More specifically, “in the municipality of Uribe (Meta), for example, the coverage rate in basic secondary education is 2%; in Cartagena del Chairá (Caquetá) it is 14%, and in Puerto Asís (Putumayo) it is less than 6%” (Min Educación, n.d). Clearly, as the figures reflect, the absence of state control in the different Colombian rural territories has frustrated the possibility of studying for thousands of children and young people. This lack of opportunities is a contributing factor in the recruitment of young people by armed groups who step into the power vacuum in these isolated and long marginalized rural areas.

Moreover, the most serious aspect of this phenomenon is the consequences of a child not being able to access basic education. Perhaps one of the most serious issues that this article is seeking to address is the linking of these children to the armed groups in their territories. According to Romero & Chávez (2008), three forms of recruitment can be seen: voluntary, forced and by birth. According to the Procuraduría General de la Nación and the ICBF: "The concept of “voluntaries” in recruitment must always and in all cases be understood as the combination of external factors that force children and adolescents to make decisions that principle are vitiated (PGN and ICBF, 2004)."

Indeed, this type of voluntary connection is facilitated mainly by personal reasons, which, although they are not the direct responsibility of the State, the context of the political, social and economic system in which children and adolescents live has strongly motivated them to join an armed group. Within this situation enters the will to change their financial situation (escape poverty), the ideological alignments with the armed groups, or even the search for revenge (Romero & Chávez, 2008).

The second type of recruitment is forced recruitment. There are children and young people who participate in the hostilities of the conflict due to physical and psychological coercion. Some were handed over by their mother or father against their will, and felt pressured and threatened by one or another armed group. Others joined because in some parts of the country each family had to provide a member of the armed group in the area of ​​influence. One such case is the story of Sebastian. He was five years old and one day the armed actors told him he could not go back home. They took him to the jungle, where they gathered him with other children and taught them not to feel pain, not to feel emotions, not to play. The guns were not plastic, on the contrary, since he was a child he used real bullets (Semana, 2021). According to a special report by Semana (2021), war does not recognize gender. Girls are also recruited, but in this case the situation can be worse, as they are not only used for war, but also they are sometimes victims of sexual crimes. Maria was not taken to the jungle by force, nor was she taken from her parents. She was used as a bargaining chip. She was 14 years old, had left home at the age of 12 and was working with a merchant, a clothing salesman. Not only that, but she helped him with his work, but seeing as he did not have enough money to take care of her welfare, he handed her over to the guerrilla. These types of cases demonstrate the lack of opportunities that young people face throughout many parts of Colombia.

And finally, there is recruitment from birth: There are boys and girls who were literally born into the guerrilla as children of combatants. They are minors who do not know another way of life and are considered property of it (Romero & Chávez, 2008). Indeed, children born in guerrilla camps did not know any other reality than war in all spheres of their lives. This not only condemned them to the violation of their human rights from birth, but even some of these children were the product of the violation of their mothers' human rights, that is, through sexual violence. As a consequence of this cruel reality where the war took freedom and childhoods from thousands of Colombian children, today we have a broken social fabric full of adults marked from childhood by the ravages of the armed conflict. Affecting them not only socially, politically and economically, but also psychologically.

According to Jaramillo (2012), the Human Development Report produced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimated that in the year 2000 there were approximately 6,000 children associated with armed groups in Colombia. And despite the fact that this figure has been reduced over the years, and even more after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement, this does not indicate for any reason that this problem is close to being resolved or that the State itself is making an effort to solve it. This can be evidenced by the complaint filed by former councillor Hollman Morris that four minors were allegedly killed in an army operation against dissidents members of the FARC guerrillas, and this sparked controversy over bombardments on camps that housed under-age recruits., several of whom were killed in the attack. However, the defense secretary mentioned that they were “young people recruited and turned into war machines” , as such removing them from their role as victims and justifying that they had to be sacrificed as well (El Espectador, 2021). Such acts and comments give an impression that just because these young people were in the ranks of the dissident group, as seen above, often through little choice of their own, they automatically forfeit their rights as Colombians. In addition, there is the curse that these victims will carry for life, even after they have been released from these armed groups. According to Sánchez et al. (2021), the children who survived the armed conflict in Colombia's Atlantic Department suffer from a variety of mental health issues, including emotional and behavioral issues. Furthermore, contextual factors such as family functioning and perceived social support were linked to these issues. These types of mental health challenges are an important public health issue since they not only affect the life of the child in the short and long term, but also that of their family and community. As peace studies indicate, war can leave an emotional footprint on children that persists throughout their lives, with indirect effects on subsequent generations (Chapple et al., 2005; Fremont, 2004; Kadir et al., 2019).

Furthermore, many of these victims continue to be persecuted even after leaving these armed groups, leading to their deaths. According to La Vanguardia (2021) since the signing of the peace agreement in September 2016, almost 250 ex-combatants have been killed. Many of these victims were participants in programs like the Havana agreement, where they complete reintegration, social work or rural productive projects for these victims. “We are lamenting, crying and demanding answers for the death of our comrades,” said Tulio Murillo Ávila, one of the FARC reinsertion leaders in Meta. One such example is the case of Albeiro, who was killed on a small cocoa plantation he was managing with other ex-combatants. The killer was a member of a FARC splinter group that had refused to lay down its arms. These testimonies show that these victims have not really been freed from their chains of pain and persecution (La Vanguardia, 2021).

In conclusion, we know that state abandonment results in a vicious circle of political rural violence, marginalizing the same territories which have historically been impacted by the conflict. Similarly, among the new conflictivities provided by armed violence are the lack of political, economic and social opportunities. Nevertheless, if there are ways of tackling the lack of development opportunities, supporting a competent educational system that can deal with the dynamics of violence in the territories is one of them. Above all, the creation an educational system that can prevent militancy, whether voluntary, forced or by birth, of thousands of Colombian children. Finally, it is clear that the establishment of a Peace Agreement with the rest of the Colombian armed groups is key to intervening with public policies that transform these marginalized territories. However, peace should never be understood as the absence of a conflict, but rather a process involving political will which must go hand in hand with projects that eradicate the violent dynamics of these communities and the country in general. In this sense, the strengthening of the educational system in rural areas, in addition to being a way to build peace and reduce the levels of violence, inequality and marginalization, represents the effective fulfillment of the human rights of thousands of Colombians.

References

El Espectador (2021). “Son máquinas de guerra”: así justificó Diego Molano bombardeo a adolescentes. https://www.elespectador.com/judicial/son-maquinas-de-guerra-asi-justifico-diego-molano-bombardeo-a-adolescentes-article/

El tiempo (s,f) Proceso de paz con las FARC: los excombatientes asesinados tras el acuerdo. https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/jep-colombia/proceso-de-paz-con-las-farc-los-excombatientes-asesinados-tras-el-acuerdo-620647

Jaramillo, M. (2012). Educational environments and fear territories amid armed conflict: study about schools in Putumayo. Revista Colombiana de Educación, 62, 21–39. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?pid=S0120-39162012000100002&script=sci_abstract&tlng=en

Martinez, J (2022) Docencia rural en Colombia: educar para la paz en medio del conflicto armado, Universidad Iberoamericana de México. https://doi.org/10.29043/liminar.v20i1.901

Revista Semana. (n.d.). Los Niños Reclutados Para La Guerra, Historias de Dolor. https://www.semana.com/especiales-editoriales/articulo/los-ninos-reclutados-para-de-la-guerra-historias-de-dolor/202122/

Robinson, A. (2021). Casi 250 ex- combatientes de las FARC, asesinados desde la paz del 2016. La Vanguardia https://www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20210105/6166607/casi-250-excombatientes-farc-asesinados-colombia-paz-2016.html

Romero Picón, Y., & Chávez Plazas, Y. (2008). El juego de la guerra, niños, niñas y adolescentes en el conflicto armado Colombia: Boys, Girls and Teenagers in the Armed Conflict of Colombia. Tabula Rasa, (8), 197-210. Retrieved March 09, 2022, from http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1794-24892008000100010&lng=en&tlng=es.

Sánchez-Villegas, M., Reyes-Ruiz, L., Taylor, L., Pérez-Ruíz, N., & Carmona-Alvarado, F. (2021). Mental health problems, family functioning and social support among children survivors of Colombia’s armed conflict. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, 13(1), 61-72.

Wald, N. (2014). Impact of Education Programs in Colombian Conflict Areas: Children Attend School More Frequently, But Performance Has Barely Improved. DIW Economic Bulletin, 4(12), 18-22. https://ideas.repec.org/a/diw/diwdeb/2014-12-4.html