Child Soldiers in Columbia

This video talks about the use of child soldiers increasing in Columbia. After reading A Long Way Gone and watching the movie Blood Diamond it startled me to see yet another country that was using child soldiers.

                The video first features a woman that is only in her twenties years old that has been subjected to the rape and cruelty of the FARC guerrillas for eleven years. She was captured by the guerillas when she was eleven and was imprisoned by them for another eleven years.

                The FARC organization has been at war with the Columbia government for a good fifty years. Their use of child soldiers showed up in the media in 2006 when someone released a video of the children being trained.

                Many children are captured and taken from their families to be trained by the revolutionary forces but there are also people that go to the organization because they are promised food and shelter. The video said that indigenous Columbians and illiterate Columbians are usually the ones that join the revolutionary forces because poverty is such a problem for them and they just want that comfort of food and shelter.

                One source said that there were eighteen thousand children that were in the revolutionary forces in the present day but a government official contested that and said that they needed to check their sources because there weren’t that many children in it.

                I am still shocked that there are still these types of wars going on. After reading things like A Long Way Gone, one would think that this type of violence would stop around the world. This might sound kind of bad but I was also kind of surprised that this was happening in Columbia and not some place in Africa. I guess it just goes to show me that I stereotype a little too much. (311)