Rome, Italy, Feb 7, 2017 / 06:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Colombia is the only country in the Americas where child soldiers can still be found.
Despite the recent signing of a peace agreement between the Colombian government and FARC rebels, it’s estimated that some 6,000 minors are still fighting for the guerrillas, though the numbers aren’t exact.
However, what is known for certain is that thousands of youth in the country hit 18 after spending years of their childhood in armed combat.
While the phenomenon is typically associated with Africa, it’s a surprisingly raw reality for Colombia, since poverty and domestic violence often leave many youth desperate, making the desire to leave home and join criminal gangs or, in this case, guerrilla forces, seem like an exciting alternative.
This was the case for Catalina and Manuel – two youth from difficult backgrounds who left home and joined forces with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), fighting in their ranks for several years until traumatic events eventually drove them to leave.
In a documentary on Salesian efforts to help troubled youth in Colombia, Catalina shared her heart-wrenching story, recounting how ever since she was little “I had issues with my stepfather. He got drunk and beat me, he always gave me bruises.”
“He hit me with hot sticks, straight from the fire. I had problems with him because he tried to abuse me,” she said. While she was able to resist her stepfather’s advances, when she attempted to tell her mother what happened, “my mother never believed me.”
Catalina described how when her stepfather would hit her mother, she would defend her, but sometimes her mother hit her as well.
“It was too much,” she said, explaining that “I grew to hate my mother.” She eventually started smoking, partying and using “basuco” – a paste used as a base for cocaine – before attempting suicide.
However, one day when she while she was out she heard a sound like “metal against metal.” When she saw that it came from FARC guerrilla fighters, she immediately left to join them at age 13.
While at first being with the guerrillas seemed “like a dream,” Catalina, who was handed a gun that was bigger than she was after just eight days in the guerrilla camp, soon found herself asking “what have I got myself into now?”
Describing the most traumatic moment during her time with the guerrillas, Catalina explained that she and her boyfriend at the time were among 44 people, including many children, who arrived at another camp.
When night came, she and her boyfriend were alone when around eight helicopters attacked their battalion.
Soon “something collapsed on me and I fell in a deep sleep. I felt sleepy and in a stupor,” she said.
While her head was still spinning, her boyfriend told her to run because the Colombian army was nearby, so “I ran as fast as I could.”
Catalina recalled how her boyfriend covered for her as she ran, but was shot and killed during the attack. “It’s tough when you share a lot with someone and they kill him,” she said, noting that she still wears a necklace he had given to her.
After experiencing the traumatic death of her boyfriend and many other friends, coupled with a sharp distaste for the disparity of how different members of the guerrillas were treated based on their status, at 16 Catalina eventually summoned the courage to run away, despite knowing the guerrillas would kill her if they ever found her.
Similarly, Manuel recounted in the documentary how he ran away from home with his brother when he was just eight-years-old due to poverty.
“We didn’t have much at home, so my brother and I decided to hit the streets together,” he said, adding that they eventually joined FARC forces simply out of curiosity.
“In the wilderness, your life starts to be a weapon,” he said, explaining that daily concerns quickly shift from simple things to something “as significant as taking a life of another. In the end, it was normal to kill someone.”
Manuel then recalled the moment his brother was killed for disobedience. Being the type of person who did what he wanted whenever he wanted to, Manuel’s brother began to break the rules in the camps they lived in.
“He didn’t change, he kept doing it and they decided to kill him,” Manuel said, explaining that he was able to say goodbye, but felt lost once his brother had been executed.
Since his brother was like “a mom and dad” to him, Manuel felt that after his brother’s death there was nothing left for him in the guerrillas, so he left, eventually ending up at the Salesian-run Don Bosco City in Medellin, where Catalina had also ended up.
The two youth, who used fake names for the sake of protection, are now both 19, and have been able start a process of healing and reintegration into society with the help of the Salesians at the center.
The Don Bosco City in Medellin focuses specifically on helping youth, and has so far helped 1,300 youth from lives of brutality, violence and emotional turmoil. A similar center in Cali has in its 15 operating years save some 2,300 youth from the same fate.
Services offered in the “city” include rehabilitation projects and psychological support, since many of the youth that come through have lived through traumatic and violent events.
Many of the girls who come have been abused, while some of the youth have even forced to choose between family members, kneeling on the floor at gunpoint and pointing out who lived and who died.
Since many of the girls have lived in brutal conditions, learning to be tough and to fight, part of the services provided at the center include teaching the girls what it means to be a woman through activities aimed at expressing their femininity.
A final phase of the program provides education and workforce development, since many of the youth dropped out of school at a young age and have an incomplete education when they arrive.
Both Catalina and Manuel have gone through the final “reinsertion” phase of the center, and are pursuing careers. While Manuel is learning technical engineering, Catalina is hoping to study at university to fulfill her lifelong dream of being a nurse.
The director of the center, Salesian priest Fr. Rafael Bejarano, was present at a Feb. 2 news conference on the documentary, alongside James Areiza, coordinator of the projects of protection and prevention at the Don Bosco city.
Bejarano told journalists that what the Church is doing, “without belonging to any political party, is to support the work the national government, together with the FARC, are doing: building together.”
“It’s not about demanding the guerrillas demobilize and give in their weapons, but about moving forward together,” he said, noting that this type of cooperation is the only way for Colombians to build lasting peace after the country’s 52 year conflict.
Since 1964, as many as 260,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in Colombia’s civil war.
According to Human Rights Watch, with more than 6.8 million people forcibly displaced due to the conflict, Colombia has the world’s second largest population of internally displaced people, with Syria in first place.
In August 2016 a peace accord between the Colombian government and the country’s largest rebel group, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was finally reached following four years of negotiations in Cuba.
However, the agreement was narrowly rejected in a referendum Oct. 2, with many claiming that it was too lenient on FARC, particularly when it came to kidnapping and drug trafficking.
A revised agreement was signed Nov. 24, and sent to Colombia’s Congress for approval, rather than being submitted to a popular vote. The reformed accord was approved Nov. 30, with revised features including the demand that FARC hand over assets to be used for reparations, a 10 year time limit for the transitional justice system, and FARC rebels’ providing information about their drug trafficking.
Since the agreement took effect abuses attributed to FARC forces have fallen sharply, according to Human Rights Watch. However, the country’s second largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), continues to commit serious abuses against civilians such as kidnapping, murder, forced displacement and child recruitment.
In his comments to journalists, Fr. Bejarano said that despite the unrest, the real Colombia “isn’t known in the world.”
Describing the country as “beautiful, multi-cultural, with an enormous natural wealth,” he said Colombians want peace, but the ability to dialogue and to build a proper “political culture” are still a work in progress. This, he said, is why the popular vote was against the referendum.
Catalina, who was present with Manuel at the new conference, said that for her the days leading up to the referendum were “moments of joy,” since in her mind and in the minds of many others with her background it meant that “no more children will be there (with the guerrillas), it’s going to be different, we will be able to return to our homes.”
Both she and Manuel live in separate camps away from their families, but are able to communicate via cell phones and, in Catalina’s case, rare visits.
Although she was sad when the popular vote rejected the referendum, Catalina said she feels a lot of “interior peace,” which is the first thing people must work for. If true peace is to be achieved, people have to “think about the other, not only ourselves,” she said.
Both she and Manuel are hopeful about the situation, saying it comes down to making a daily commitment to work for peace.
As far as reintegration, Catalina noted that “everyone makes mistakes,” and that for certain people, there will always be a hole in their lives that can’t be patched up.
“There are many people who hold a grudge for what happened, for the massacres they lived and don’t forgive,” she said, but added that for the youth who have come through the Don Bosco City, “we have an opportunity.”
“There are many who don’t want it, but we must give the opportunity despite all these (things),” and must make the most of what they themselves have received.
[…]
What is there to celebrate about 500 years of heresy?
I’m fairly sure the Protestants involved don’t view it as heresy. Not defending it; just pointing out the obvious.
I’m fairly sure many of the Catholics involved don’t either!
Good for them – more power to them.
A Lutheran Chief of Chaplain Service once told me we Catholics are obsessed with the Law. It seems a hangover from Luther’s insistence that faith alone saves. I responded our laws focus on charity. He in his own way was a charitable person. He responded he thought of becoming Catholic. Despite the inane comment by Steven Fuit, president of the UPCB that “our unity essentially derives from respecting differences” our unity derives from faith in Christ and following His commandments, even if the latter is tacitly admitted by the practice of many Lutherans.
MORTALIUM ANIMOS
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI
ON RELIGIOUS UNITY
TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN THE PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES,
ARCHBISHOPS, BISHOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES
IN PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE.
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI
ON RELIGIOUS UNITY
6. We were created by God, the Creator of the universe, in order that we might know Him and serve Him; our Author therefore has a perfect right to our service. God might, indeed, have prescribed for man’s government only the natural law, which, in His creation, He imprinted on his soul, and have regulated the progress of that same law by His ordinary providence; but He preferred rather to impose precepts, which we were to obey, and in the course of time, namely from the beginnings of the human race until the coming and preaching of Jesus Christ, He Himself taught man the duties which a rational creature owes to its Creator: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days, hath spoken to us by his Son.”[3] From which it follows that there can be no true religion other than that which is founded on the revealed word of God: which revelation, begun from the beginning and continued under the Old Law, Christ Jesus Himself under the New Law perfected. Now, if God has spoken (and it is historically certain that He has truly spoken), all must see that it is man’s duty to believe absolutely God’s revelation and to obey implicitly His commands; that we might rightly do both, for the glory of God and our own salvation, the Only-begotten Son of God founded His Church on earth. Further, We believe that those who call themselves Christians can do no other than believe that a Church, and that Church one, was established by Christ; but if it is further inquired of what nature according to the will of its Author it must be, then all do not agree. A good number of them, for example, deny that the Church of Christ must be visible and apparent, at least to such a degree that it appears as one body of faithful, agreeing in one and the same doctrine under one teaching authority and government; but, on the contrary, they understand a visible Church as nothing else than a Federation, composed of various communities of Christians, even though they adhere to different doctrines, which may even be incompatible one with another. Instead, Christ our Lord instituted His Church as a perfect society, external of its nature and perceptible to the senses, which should carry on in the future the work of the salvation of the human race, under the leadership of one head,[4] with an authority teaching by word of mouth,[5] and by the ministry of the sacraments, the founts of heavenly grace;[6] for which reason He attested by comparison the similarity of the Church to a kingdom,[7] to a house,[8] to a sheepfold,[9] and to a flock.[10] This Church, after being so wonderfully instituted, could not, on the removal by death of its Founder and of the Apostles who were the pioneers in propagating it, be entirely extinguished and cease to be, for to it was given the commandment to lead all men, without distinction of time or place, to eternal salvation: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations.”[11] In the continual carrying out of this task, will any element of strength and efficiency be wanting to the Church, when Christ Himself is perpetually present to it, according to His solemn promise: “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world?”[12] It follows then that the Church of Christ not only exists to-day and always, but is also exactly the same as it was in the time of the Apostles, unless we were to say, which God forbid, either that Christ our Lord could not effect His purpose, or that He erred when He asserted that the gates of hell should never prevail against it.[13]