Three weeks after a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia, the United Nations warned Friday that the disaster is opening a new front in an old conflict: armed groups recruiting children left without schools to go to. [1]
The quake, which struck Aug. 10, killed 331 people, injured 4,449 and left 219 missing, affecting more than 406,000 people across 15 departments and 496 municipalities. [1] Its physical toll on education has been severe on a scale distinct from the death count: more than 3,800 educational facilities were damaged, disrupting schooling for over one million students, with nearly 178,000 of them attending schools that suffered serious structural damage. In Chocó, some rural schools were destroyed outright, others partially collapsed, and several remain at imminent risk of further collapse; assessments are still underway in Risaralda and Caldas to determine which buildings can safely reopen. [1]
UN Resident Coordinator in Colombia María José Torres Macho told reporters at UN Headquarters that recruitment by illegal armed groups was already a concern in Chocó and Valle del Cauca before the earthquake hit — these are departments where such groups have long been active, and where the quake struck communities already contending with poverty, isolation and armed violence. "We are concerned that the situation of children out of school can exacerbate this problem," she said. [1] The mechanism she is describing is not abstract: a school is not only a place of instruction but, in a conflict zone, one of the few institutional structures capable of keeping a child inside a monitored, protective routine. Remove the school and remove that structure at the same time, and the space an armed group needs to make an approach simply opens wider.
"Those areas most affected are those areas most vulnerable," Torres Macho said, describing how the pre-existing conflict is complicating both the emergency response and the longer recovery — the same communities facing the earthquake's worst physical damage are the ones with the least existing capacity to absorb it. [1] That overlap is not a coincidence of geography; it is what the UN calls the reason a natural disaster in a conflict zone behaves differently than one elsewhere. Displacement tied to the conflict itself has continued in parallel with the earthquake response. In Sipí, Chocó, roughly 95 Afro-Colombian people were displaced from the community of Charco Hondo, with UN officials worried the displacement could spread to two neighboring communities — a conflict-driven crisis layering on top of the earthquake-driven one, in the same towns, at the same time. [1]
The response effort is running short of what it needs. Since the earthquake, the UN system and its humanitarian partners have reached around 72,000 people across 36 municipalities in Chocó, Valle del Cauca, Risaralda and Caldas, providing food, water, medical care, shelter, psychosocial support, protection and education services. [1] But the UN's updated humanitarian response plan estimates 1.2 million people now need assistance, with roughly 127,000 identified as the most severely affected and requiring priority support — a population the current reach falls well short of covering. The plan requires $148.1 million; only 40 percent of that has been received. [1] In Caldas, food and hygiene distributions have leaned in part on donations that are already running out, with no clear capacity to sustain the next round. Among shelters assessed across the four hardest-hit departments, 33 percent report sanitation and hygiene needs, 31 percent face problems accessing water, and 22 percent need food. [1]
Torres Macho framed the recovery task as one that has to look past the immediate emergency toward how these communities are rebuilt at all, warning against decisions that simply restore what existed before the quake in places that were already among Colombia's most vulnerable. "It is very important to also provide support to the municipalities, so there is some urban planning and we don't reproduce vulnerability and end up creating another disaster," she said. [1]
That last warning applies as much to the recruitment risk as to physical rebuilding. A school rebuilt without also restoring the protective routine it represented does not close the opening the UN is describing; it only postpones the reckoning with it. For the moment, the choice facing aid agencies and Colombia's government is a narrow one: get children back inside a classroom before the armed groups already operating in Chocó and Valle del Cauca decide the gap has been open long enough.
-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo