Taller De Vida Reintegrates Colombia’s Former Child Soldiers Into Society

“I’ve tried to keep my arms strong so I would have the power to carry a weapon which would help me forget the pain and sadness they planted in me, in the childhood I never had,” Sofia [pseudonym], a former child soldier in Colombia captioned her photo of a tree she took as part of her photography project with Taller de Vida’s Psychosocial Development and Consulting Center.

Sofia is among the thousands of ex-combatant child soldiers in Colombia’s 52-year bloody conflict that has engulfed the South American country of over 50 million. Nearly 16,000 Colombian children have been part of armed groups in Colombia–120,000 persons have disappeared. 

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s largest rebel group, founded in 1964 as the armed wing of the Communist Party with a Marxist-Leninist ideology, initially comprised small farmers banding together against the staggering inequalities. The August 2016 FARC-signed peace pact aimed to end over half a century of conflict, committed by rebels, government forces, and right-wing paramilitaries. Dissidents, the government, and paramilitaries continue violent attacks and recruit child soldiers as conflicts continue with left-wing fighters, drug-traffickers, and right-wing paramilitaries wanting control of cocaine, and illegal mineral extractions. Ranked as the most dangerous country for human rights and environmental defenders, some 80% of deaths in Colombia link to powerful economic exploitations of land and natural resources like nickel, natural gas, and coal. The situation worsened under right-wing President Iván Duque’s government.

Nine years ago, Sofia left FARC after being recruited at age 12 by her uncle, who died soon after. Over four years, trained as a child soldier and sexually exploited, she endured hard labor. A freak accident sent her plunging into a river, and assumed dead as she floated away, and eventually found by the Colombian army. Disabled with a shattered hip and brought to Bogotá for a “re-establishment process,” she joined thousands of “disengaged persons.” Assigned to a guardian family, she had two surgeries that partially restored her ability to walk.

“My guardian mother took me to Taller de Vida for psychosocial support–I told them everything I had lived through. They prepared me for my meeting with my grandmother, whom I had left without telling her anything,” says Sofia regretfully. “At Taller, I felt like a child again–we sang, they gave us delicious food, and they listened to us. For the first time in my life, I went to the movies and met important people from universities and other countries.”

Putting Pieces Back Together in Taller de Vida

Stella Duque [no relations to the current president], a clinical psychologist and Executive Director of Taller de Vida (Life’s Workshop) in Bogotá, has lived through socio-political violence since an early age. Her father, Rafael Duque Perea, was an educator murdered in April 1988. She witnessed the forced disappearance of young people and community leader murders.

“Those years, many people and families in Bogotá lost relatives, friends, and their lands: orphaned by geography and the silence of impunity,” Duque joined a group of women to preserve the memory of their loved ones. “We didn’t want to remain anonymous and silenced by fear.”

Taller de Vida was born out of a resistance process, inspired by dialogue and support, says Duque. Providing psychosocial support for Afro-Colombian and Indigenous women and youth survivors of violence and war, the center integrates art and peace activism for youth survivors and youth at risk of recruitment. Grants and contributions by international organizations such as MADRE, Terre des Hommes Germany, Karin Von Hozbrink of Germany, individuals, and civil society fund its services. 

“In partnership with Taller de Vida we’re working together to bring a stable peace in Colombia’s most affected communities and help people heal from war’s disruption and sorrow,” says Yifat Susskind, Executive Director of MADRE. “While war, violence, and displacement disproportionately impact women and the youth worldwide–they are also at the forefront of leading communities into peace.”

Having connected with some 20,000 girls, children, and youth, nearly 3,000 families have gone through Taller de Vida’s methodology of overcoming the impact of violence through psychological, moral integrity, and social inclusion healing–and reintegrated into their communities.

“Uniting as women and inspired by the German-born American political theorist Hannah Arendt, we understood how violence is mute and lacks discourse. For discourse to thrive, it is essential to empower survivors to express their words,” explains Duque. “This is the way to build a society of equals, capable of healthy discourse and action.”

Taller de Vida uses photography and theatre in its ‘TAKE MY BODY OUT OF WAR‘ campaign to present the sexual violence against girls and women in the framework of armed conflict. With ‘THAT CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO TELL WAR STORIES‘ campaign, it calls on civil society to recognize children’s recruitment and abuse by armed groups and drug traffickers. In partnership with the Coalition Against the Involvement of Children and Youth in the Armed Conflict in Colombia (COALICO), it ensures monitoring, advocacy, defense, and promotion of the rights of children and youth–positively transforming the damage of the armed conflict.

Trained in mountain camps with 60 others, ages 12 to 14, Sofia hopes no one experiences hard labor or sexual exploitation. While her commanders promised a better future, the reality and abuse for the poverty-stricken youth was anything but bright. Joining Taller’s photography collective, she “learned to shoot a camera, not a gun.” 

While completing her primary education and recovering from surgeries, Sofia became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Taller de Vida supported her pregnancy and single parenting of her now seven-year-old daughter.

“I adore my daughter–she is the engine of my life. I have had terrible experiences with relationships. I think when you have a story and share it, some see you as something used and hurt by life,” she says. “We have a little house–it is my own, very humble, but we are building it. We have everything my daughter and I need.”

Sofia and her daughter have a new life in a new city. A student herself, she earned an income by selling sundries from a stall at a local bus terminal, but the pandemic forced her to close it. Helping her daughter with schoolwork sent via WhatsApp, Taller de Vida helps her pay for the costly Internet minutes. 

Child Soldiers’ Soul Wounds

“Being involved in armed conflict leaves wounds in the soul–it’s difficult to recover. It hurts seeing the recent attacks on FARC dissident camps–girls getting killed. They are not ‘war machines,’ as the Minister of Defense said. They forced them to be there.”

Sowing seeds of “fear, anxiety, and silence,” political violence denies its victims the capacity for action and decision, Duque explains. To heal, it’s essential to build supportive relationships to provide continuity to those who faced murder or the disappearance of a loved one. While deniers of the peace process agreements attack Taller de Vida’s efforts recently, the NGO continues its services working with Indigenous and Afro-descendant community councils and trains local teachers in “psychosocial accompaniment” to identify families in need.

“Our methodology is based on the resilience and expressive arts approach. Resilience is a necessary skill so a person or a group of people can face difficult situations: pain, sadness, wounds, emotional distress—and redefine these experiences to develop resources to overcome, transform their lives, and face challenges,” Duque says their theater collective performances across South America and Europe included workshops and meetings with local organizations where they taught inter-culturality–with psychosocial intervention processes and understanding of culture as a permanent construct of memory. 

Colombia’s political violence, Duque says, “is linked to land tenure, dispossession of territories, and territorial control for extractive exploitation for the development of macro projects.” Exacerbated by the continuous assassination of leaders defending their territories and the possibility of returning to their communities, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples are targets of fear tactics. 

“Instead of a capitalist model wanting to ensure its development through militarization, economic globalization, and the generation of poverty, there should be peace building and coexistence as we care for Mother Earth and humanity,” Duque says failure to act will lead to greater crises, risking the survival of an entire people and the extermination of cultures with different world views. “It is not the time to be silent. We must act for a humanity that lives and interacts in peace.”

Hoping the Taller de Vida Theater Collective will travel again to developing countries, Duque wants to listen to children’s voices crying out for peace and for another social order to guarantee integrity and social justice.

“Pay attention to the children. To achieve peace, we have to renounce war and achieve reconciliation as Colombians,” Sofia says she plans to rebuild her life, buy a computer for herself and her daughter, and secure a technical career, so her disability doesn’t prevent her employment. “I want to visit other countries, write a book about my story to educate and help change the situation we lived as children in Colombia. I want to help my aging grandmother, continue improving my little house, make sure my daughter never lives what I experienced, and hope to raise my daughter and travel one day together.”