Colombia: Six Decades of Fighting for Peace : Paramilitary Reemerges http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/colombia-six-decades-of-fighting-for_11.html

For the most part this peace process was Uribe’s gift to the paramilitaries that he and his cousin, Mario Uribe, helped to create when Alvaro was a senator, a sort of “get out of jail free card” with many benefits. Besides a few dozen leaders of the blocs who were extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for drug trafficking and money laundering, the paracos were shuffled through a loose process and sent out to become good citizens again. Now it appears that it didn’t happen that way.

There are between 8,000 and 14,000 children involved in Colombia’s ongoing conflict, working for gangs and armed groups, according to figures released by an NGO on Friday to mark the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers. The Humanitarian Diplomatic Mission, a Medellin-based NGO, reports that Colombia has the fourth-highest number of child soldiers in the world, behind Burma, Sudan, and the Congo.

“In the last two years, the conflict in Colombia has changed, and there are now children in the intermediate structures of these armed groups doing intelligence work and drug trafficking,” their report says.Children as young as six are involved in the conflict, either carrying arms or doing intelligence work.The level of violence against children in Colombia is “very high,” according to the report. Sergio Tapia, the NGO’s president, told Caracol Radio that, “We suspect that 10% of victims of paramilitaries are children,” and that thousands of these deaths have not been reported to authorities.

The International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers, February 12, commemorates the UN protocol which came into force on this date in 2002, banning the recruitment of minors under the age of 18 into armed groups. The report supports remarks made by Colombian Vice President Santos on Wednesday, in which he called the [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia] FARC’s recruitment of minors “a disgrace," and expressed the government is very concerned about this phenomenon, the recruitment of children.There was no mention of his friends and supporters, the paramilitars.

comment-also see...Obama: We will move forward with Colombia FTA http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/8652-obama-positive-about-fta-with-colombia.html