NEWS
Colombia: a 2016 peace deal, and children recruited at gunpoint in 2025
21 July 2026
The facts
In 2016 Colombia signed one of the decade's most celebrated peace agreements, ending fifty years of war between the state and the FARC. Less than ten years later, in a region on the Venezuelan border called Catatumbo, tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes within weeks — not because of the war that had ended, but the one that took its place. In January 2025 the National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerrilla group active since the 1960s that never demobilised, launched an offensive to retake Catatumbo from Front 33, a dissident group that emerged from the 2017 FARC demobilisation.
According to Human Rights Watch's World Report, published on 4 February 2026, the ELN's campaign involved killings, assaults, kidnappings and disappearances of civilians accused of ties to the rival group, forcing over 64,000 people to flee. The starkest figure concerns children: Colombia's Ombudsperson's Office documented 625 cases of child recruitment by armed groups in 2024, an 81% increase over the 342 cases in 2023, with UN data indicating the trend continued through 2025. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the tribunal born of the 2016 accord, has already convicted seven former FARC leaders of crimes against humanity and war crimes — including torture, sexual violence and enslavement — linked to the kidnapping of at least 21,396 victims over the course of the historic conflict.
Legal commentary
Child recruitment is prohibited under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which Colombia is a state party, as well as under Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions, applicable to the non-international armed conflict still ongoing in the country. Colombia is also a state party to the Rome Statute: the Colombia situation, opened by the International Criminal Court in 2004, was closed in 2021 on the basis of domestic justice's commitment — chiefly the Special Jurisdiction for Peace — to prosecute these crimes; whether the resurgence of violence in Catatumbo could bring the ICC's attention back to the country remains an open question, not yet resolved by the sources consulted.
Implications — the symmetry test
The symmetry test applies here in the same way already used for other non-state armed groups covered by this site — the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon: individual criminal responsibility does not depend on which flag one fights under. Gustavo Petro's government declared a state of internal commotion in the region and deployed the armed forces — an intervention the cited sources do not dispute in principle, while questions remain open about its effectiveness and the real protection of civilians on the ground. Colombia also appears among the countries flagged by the IRC's 2026 Emergency Watchlist as a context of rising risk, yet it rarely resurfaces in international headlines. This site had not written about it at all, until today.
Sources: Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026, Colombia chapter · IRC — 2026 Emergency Watchlist