BOGOTÁ, Colombia – Colombia’s defense minister said on Wednesday that several young people were in a rebel camp recently attacked by the military, but would not confirm reports that children were among those killed, an allegation that provoked deep outrage in a nation ruled by decades of war. .
In an interview on W Radio, the minister, Diego Molano, said that ‘young fighters’, who were recruited by criminal actors and turned into ‘war machines’, were present at a military operation aimed at a violent armed group to rig.
But he has repeatedly refused to disclose the ages of the dead, amid reports from local officials and newspapers that one or more of those killed were minors, including a 9-year-old girl. In the interview, Mr. Molano called the information “illegal” and part of a “political war to provide information that sought to delegitimize our military.” On the program, the host read out the names of those who had died in the local press reports.
The allegations immediately resonated in a nation plagued by decades of brutal civil war, involving the US-backed government, left-wing rebels, right-wing paramilitary and powerful drug cartels – which regularly included child fighters and claimed many civilian victims. Today, the country is divided over a peace agreement in 2016 that sought to end the era but had only limited success.
On Wednesday morning, the Colombian army announced that it had killed 12 people during a military operation aimed at the ‘criminal structure’ of an armed group led by Miguel Botache, known under the alias Gentil Duarte, a former member of Colombia’s largest rebel group, Colombia’s leftist revolutionary army, or FARC.
The FARC signed a peace agreement with the government in 2016, which officially ended the war between the two parties. But some rebels, including Mr. Duarte, abandoned the peace agreement and returned to arms.
As the FARC withdrew from large parts of the area, other violent groups moved in, turning many communities into battlefields between the military, old and new rebel groups, and paramilitary groups. For many in Colombia, the war is not over yet.
President Iván Duque has been increasingly criticized for not doing enough to stop the violence.
In late 2019, his former defense minister, Guillermo Botero, left his post after failing to disclose that several children had been killed during a military raid on a criminal group.
In the radio interview, Molano said that the most recent operation, which took place on March 2 in the department of Guaviare, falls within the bounds of international law. He blamed the leaders of armed groups for the deaths.
“We are not talking about young people who did not know what they were doing,” he said of those who join such groups.
“Who’s in charge of recruiting, to turn it into war machines?” he added. “It’s those organizations, not the national army.”
These remarks drew immediate criticism from various sectors of Colombian society, who said that young people recruited by armed groups should be seen as victims, not perpetrators.
The country has been consumed for decades in a conversation about how to deal with child recruitment.
“They are not warriors, but victims of war,” wrote Diego Cancino, a councilor in Bogotá, the capital, on Twitter. “Minister Diego Molano, you can not justify the unjustified.”
Sofía Villamil reported.