By Lorena Andrade, a member of the Mi Historia journalism project, originally published on Global Voices.
In 2018, my life changed in ways I could never have imagined. I grew up in the Meta district in Colombia, where the law is just a suggestion and poverty is a given. There, kids and teenagers, girls and boys alike, are easy prey for the armed groups, especially for dissident wings of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).
Since forever, football has been my safe space. Every evening, after school, I’d run to the pitch with my friends and we’d train until it was too dark to see. It was at one of these training sessions that I met David. He was new at school, a 17-year old kid who’d joined to finish ninth grade. I liked him right from the start; we talked a lot, and he’d always be waiting for me at the end of training. Little by little, he worked his way into my confidence and, ultimately, into my heart. We started going out and, for six months, I thought I’d found my special someone.
But one day, after training, reality hit me like someone kicking the ball in my face. We were alone, and out of nowhere, his manner changed completely. He grabbed me roughly and told me I had to go with him. My heart stopped for a second. I tried to work out what was happening, but I was paralyzed with fear. I told him, no, I couldn’t go with him. That was when he confessed that if I didn’t go with him to join the guerrillas, they would kill him. In that moment, I realised it had all been a trap. The whole time we’d been dating, David’s real intentions had been to recruit me as a guerrilla. He’d used seduction and emotional manipulation as his weapons.
In Colombia, armed groups have always used seduction as a recruitment technique. But forcing young men to recruit even younger girls is something new in Colombia’s Llanos Orientales, our western plains.
As dissident factions of the FARC and other armed groups look to expand and fill the vacuum left by recent demobilizations, they take advantage of our vulnerability. They promise protection, safety, and a sense of belonging that so many of us lack at home. Our teachers warn us about their methods, and I myself knew stories about other youngsters who’d fallen into this trap. But I never thought it could happen to me.
I was lucky. That day, my brother saw us fighting in the street and ran to my rescue. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. Perhaps I wouldn’t be here to tell my story. Now, I still play football, but it’s not the same anymore. Something inside me broke that day. Perhaps it was the loss of innocence, the feeling of not being safe anymore, or simply no longer just being able to enjoy the pure happiness of running after a ball.
According to the Commission for the Discovery of Truth (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad) and the Study of the Characteristics of Disenfranchised youth [Estudio de caracterización de la niñez desvinculada (2013–2022)], published jointly by UNICEF and the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar), the victims of forced recruitment tend to come from impoverished, rural social backgrounds. Emotional manipulation is a systematic and well-established recruitment technique used by armed groups against these youngsters, and it is often teenagers, often girls, particularly those who have suffered mistreatment or abuse in their own families, who are most vulnerable to their emotional blackmail.
My story is one of many. Here in the Llanos Orientales, the promise of a better life or just a hot meal can be enough to tempt some young people into joining the armed groups. Some are kidnapped, others are blackmailed, and some are offered bribes. Methods vary, but the result is the same: we lose our childhoods and our futures.
Today, I keep fighting both on the football pitch and in life. Every day I try to get back some of what I lost, and, at the same time, to be a voice for those who can’t tell their stories. Because in all this darkness, we need to remember there is still hope, and that together, we can change our destiny.
Keywords: Colombia, seduction, youth, grooming, trafficking, armed groups, armed recruitment, child soldiers, forced recruitment, FARC, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, conflict, conflict resolution, peace, relationships, teens, teenagers
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