MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombian guerrilla kill 13-year old girl for twice abandoning the group

FARC has a policy of forcibly recruiting teenagers

A commander from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, in the southern province of Tolima ordered the execution of a 13-year-old girl who had been turned over to the guerrillas by her mother on two occasions, an army spokesman said.

The mother turned over the girl the first time in a rural part of the municipality of Chaparral, General Guillermo Suarez, the commander of the Southern Task Force in Tolima, said.

The girl fled the ranks of the FARC Gabriel Galvis column some time later because she had been subjected to degrading treatment and sexual abuse, but once again her mother made her available to the left wing group financed by the drugs’ cartels, said the Colombian Army.

“We set our units about the task of finding the girl and unfortunately ... the mother once again, in an irrational act, turned her over to the terrorist ‘Teofilo’ with the Gabriel Galvis column, who ordered them to murder the girl,” General Suarez told RCN Radio.

In this area of Tolima province, an important FARC enclave, the guerrillas have a plan to recruit minors between 12 and 14 years old, in exchange for farmland for the children’s families, the General said.

“This is a wake-up call for all parents in southern Tolima. They cannot be delivering their children to the war, nor fostering forced recruitment practices,” Suarez told Caracol Radio.

Authorities should conduct a rigorous investigation and appropriately punish the mother of the murdered girl for putting her at risk, the director of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare in that region, Carlos Eduardo Buenaventura, said.

The social welfare agency revealed it had received dozens of complaints about child and teenager recruitment by the FARC in southern Tolima.