BY TIM JOHNSON
 Miami Herald Staff Writer

 VILLAVICENCIO, Colombia -- At age 16, after four years as a leftist rebel,
 Carolina Gomez knows she may have killed people in battle. But she recalls only
 one of her victims -- a wounded soldier so young that his image sticks in her
 mind.

 ``He had a baby face,'' she remembers.

 For too many years, the face of children has been the face of Colombia's endless
 civil war, a conflict in which children often kill other children. Now, under mounting
 public pressure, the country is taking the first steps toward ending this
 particularly cruel aspect of the conflict, but many more children with baby faces
 seemed destined to die before the practice can be ended.

 Only last month, the army halted recruitment of soldiers under age 18, but
 thousands of minors still fill the ranks of rebel and private outlaw armies. Kids as
 young as 12 and 14 tote rifles, and serve on front lines to protect adult fighters.

 Among rightist paramilitary forces, child combatants are known as ``little bells''
 because they serve as an early-warning system. Leftist guerrillas call their child
 members ``little bees'' for their agility and power to sting. In the cities, child
 members of criminal gangs are called ``mini-cars'' because they ferry drugs and
 weapons without raising suspicions.

 The use of child combatants -- those under age 18 -- is the most blatant example
 of how this nation's 17 million children suffer from the civil war. Massive rural
 violence has uprooted 700,000 minors, human-rights monitors say, and many of
 those kids fail to attend school. Juvenile crimes are soaring, and youth gangs in
 cities like Medellin flourish. Throughout the country, many children live in fear of
 becoming victims of massacres and kidnappings.

 The narcotics trade, which fuels the civil war, now relies heavily on a child labor
 force. Thousands of nimble-fingered kids pick the coca leaves and harvest the
 poppy gum that provide the raw material for cocaine and heroin.

 ``Every child in Colombia is impacted in one way or another,'' said Martin Kelsey,
 who until December headed the Colombia office of the Save the Children Fund of
 Britain.

 It is the widespread use of child warriors, though, that has most visibly troubled
 the nation. After several major battles in 1999, dozens of fallen guerrillas turned
 out to be barely in their teens, prompting President Andres Pastrana to implore
 insurgents to stop using child fighters.

 After one battle, Gen. Fernando Tapias, the military commander, declared that 30
 percent of all leftist rebels and rightist militias are children.

 ``We are talking about 8,000 to 10,000 minors who today are with the guerrillas or
 the self-defense forces,'' Tapias said. ``They are being taken away as young as 9
 years old.''

 RIVAL ARMIES

 They compete over ideology,
 territory and criminal profits

 Colombia today is an amalgam of rival armies, competing over ideology, turf and
 criminal profits. On one side are two major leftist insurgencies that took up arms
 in 1964 and put forth a vision of a Marxist Colombia. Now numbering at least
 20,000 fighters combined, the two groups roam at least half of the country,
 making money through kidnapping, extortion and protection of coca plantations
 and cocaine processing laboratories.

 On the other extreme are private armies financed by ranchers, rural business
 owners and rival drug gangs. These armies describe themselves as self-defense
 forces, but are commonly called paramilitaries or militias. Probably 7,000 fighters
 strong, the militias espouse anti-communism but have grown increasingly
 enmeshed in the drug trade themselves.

 Both sides deny that that they pay combatants regular wages, although they
 admit to irregular stipends that lure impoverished rural youth.

 Among outlaw groups, all sides recruit children to be used as scouts, spies and
 fighters, and experts lament that they have become frighteningly effective tools of
 war.

 ``They are afraid of nothing,'' said Beatriz Linares, director of child advocacy at the
 Office of the People's Defender, a state watchdog agency.

 Adolescent girls are sometimes recruited for special missions. ``The girl is told,
 `Look, go and sleep with the soldier and get information from him,' '' said Lina
 Gutierrez of the Colombian Child Welfare Institute.

 In the vast cattle and coca-growing plains that spread east from this gateway city
 to the Amazon and Orinoco Basins, 55 miles east of Bogota, guerrillas and
 rightist militias have stepped up their recruitment efforts as they gird for further
 war. Recruiting is not difficult, given the poverty, widespread domestic abuse and
 lack of public services that afflict rural areas.

 Rebels easily gain young followers. ``They let them carry their weapons for a
 while. They give them a little money. The youngsters begin believing that life as a
 guerrilla is really cool,'' said Rocio Lopez Robayo of the local Office of the
 People's Defender.

 In visits in and near the cities of Villavicencio, Bogota and Medellin, The Herald
 spoke with numerous teenage former rebels and criminal gang members. Some
 had been captured and were in custody. Others deserted. A few seemed eager to
 return to normal adolescence. Still others spoke of changing sides in the armed
 conflict or returning to crime.

 At a youth detention camp near Villavicencio, 14-year-old Elkin Dario Galindo
 sucked on a lollipop and played with camp puppies -- a sharp contrast to his
 earlier life with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

 His recruitment came in lieu of a family debt to the rebels. ``They came to collect,
 and my father said he didn't have the money. They asked me to go with them. My
 father said no. They took me anyway,'' said Galindo, who has a second-grade
 education.

 Galindo was taught commando tactics with the FARC's 7th Front, but grew bored
 after two years.

 Did he kill anyone, he was asked.

 `I don't know. I was just shooting my AK-47. In combat you never know if you've
 just killed someone.''

 Last year, he escaped with a fellow guerrilla, a woman of 22. As they fled,
 grasping hands, the woman was shot in the head. Firing back with his stolen
 9mm pistol, Galindo escaped unharmed.

 But as a FARC deserter, Galindo knows a dear price may await him: ``If I get
 caught, they'll kill me.''

 Protecting former child combatants like Galindo poses a problem for authorities.
 The law does not yet contemplate special rehabilitation for former teenage
 combatants, and they are mixed with hardened juvenile delinquents in camps
 despite vast differences in attitudes and lifestyles.

 ``The former guerrilla kids are disciplined. These are kids who wake up, for
 example, at five in the morning,'' said Linares.
 
ONE GIRL'S STORY

 How a 14-year-old joined
 FARC and fought in 6 battles

 Only last month, authorities opened their first safe house exclusively for former
 child combatants. Its location is secret, although officials let a reporter and
 photographer visit. It was there that a 14-year-old former rebel, who gave her name
 as Adriana Rodriguez, told of how she joined the FARC at age 11.

 ``I always looked at the guerrillas with fascination,'' she said shyly, hair covering
 her face and looking at her lap. ``In Arauca, I've seen guerrillas my whole life.
 They gave us talks on what they were fighting for.''

 At her tender age, Rodriguez has been in six major battles, including a bloody
 ambush of 150 or so counter-insurgency troops in El Billar in March 1998 that
 dealt a huge setback for the armed forces. In all the battles, she said, minors
 were on the front lines.

 ``There are a lot of minors in the guerrillas. Most of them are 14 or older,'' she
 said, although a few are younger.

 While military officers accuse the FARC and a separate rebel group, the National
 Liberation Army, of forcibly recruiting children, experts say most youngsters join
 voluntarily, frustrated by a lack of educational opportunity and other factors. Some
 600,000 children under age 12 don't have access to schooling in Colombia.
 Moreover, of every 100 kids that begin elementary school, only 40 finish, said
 Astrid Rendon of the Don Bosco Center for Children in Medellin.

 In areas dominated by guerrillas or militias, children often see joining as a viable
 career option. ``It's a rational economic choice that a 14-year-old or a 15-year-old
 can make,'' said Kelsey.

 Even so, many grow disillusioned by the rigors of jungle life, frightened by the
 battles and bored with guarding kidnap victims or coca plantations.

 ``You sleep like a pig in the rain,'' said Gustavo Urrego Gomez, 17, who fought for
 a year with the FARC's 5th Front in western Antioquia state.

 Many youngsters appear to feel trapped in the FARC insurgency. ``It is full of
 minors who are sorry they joined,'' said Alexander Rico, a 17-year-old who fought
 with the rebels for more than two years before fleeing.

 No one knows for sure if the rebels have more child combatants or less than the
 rightist armies. Hard numbers are difficult to obtain. Anecdotal evidence indicates
 that paramilitary groups rely just as heavily on minors as the FARC. One study
 said as many as 50 percent of paramilitaries in the Middle Magdalena river valley,
 an anti-guerrilla stronghold, were children.

 Humanitarian officials say they are rebuffed by paramilitary or guerrilla
 commanders when they ask to speak with their adolescent members.

 ``They say that the kids don't want to go home. But how can you be sure? They
 don't let you interview them,'' said Lopez, the defender for Meta state.

 ADOLESCENT TRAUMA

 In line of fire, kids become killers
 and suffer the wounds of war

 A two-year 1998 study by the national Office of the People's Defender
 underscored the trauma that former adolescent combatants endure. The study
 showed that 18 percent of child combatants had killed someone, and 60 percent
 had watched people being killed. Some 25 percent had seen kidnappings, and 28
 percent had been wounded.

 Silverio Buitrago, 17, a former FARC rebel, displays a bullet wound to his leg,
 then lifts his shirt to show huge scar tissue in his back.

 ``It was from shrapnel from a bomb that came from an airplane,'' he said. ``It really
 burns inside.''

 Repulsed by images of entire platoons of rifle-toting children in places like Sierra
 Leone and Uganda, worldwide outrage over the use of child combatants --
 estimated to number 300,000 around the globe -- is growing.

 In Colombia, the armed forces agreed in 1997 to end a common practice of
 drafting boys aged 16 and 17 without consent of their parents.

 Now, the military has gone further. In a ceremony Dec. 20, the armed forces
 discharged 980 soldiers under age 18, all of whom had enlisted with parental
 consent. Military leaders said the move purged the armed forces of its last
 adolescents.

 ``As of today, the army will contain no minors, under any circumstances,''
 Pastrana said at the ceremony. ``How sad that outlaw groups, contending that
 they want the creation of a new country, don't do the same, and keep using the
 children of Colombia as cannon fodder!''

 He called on insurgents to, at the least, respect international law, which bans
 children from being sent to war under the age of 15.

 Some child rights advocates are working through the United Nations to try to
 change international law to raise the minimum age for combatants to age 18, but
 they say they have been stymied by lack of U.S. government support.

 When Olara Otunnu, a Ugandan who is U.N. undersecretary general for Children
 and Armed Conflict, visited Colombia last June, he extracted a promise from
 FARC commanders that the group would stop recruiting minors under age 15,
 though all evidence indicates the promise has been broken.

 In an interview then, Otunnu noted that armed groups often teach minors
 astonishing cruelty: ``Some of the child soldiers are among the most ruthless
 fighters we've seen, committing some of the worst atrocities precisely because
 they don't fully realize what they are doing. They've been indoctrinated. They've
 been taught do this, and they'll do it.''

 By sheer numbers, the problem of child warriors is small compared to the
 large-scale tragedy of children displaced by Colombia's rural violence. Experts
 say the number of internal refugees has climbed past 1.2 million, filling
 shantytowns and plastic tent cities, like the one that sprung up in December five
 miles south of this provincial capital.

 In the mud-slick camp, cooking fires smolder in open-air tents and parents offer
 pitiful tales of uprooting their families to flee violence and elude the pull of the
 armed conflict on their children.

 ``There are pressures from all sides, from the [paramilitaries] and the guerrillas,''
 said Byron Arbelaez, a 19-year-old Karapala Indian from far eastern Colombia.
 ``They just want people. It doesn't matter if they are boys or girls.''

 In their respective areas of control, both guerrillas and paramilitaries suggest to
 families that they offer at least one of their children to the war.

 That rural mathematics was about to claim one of the children of Jorge Eliecer
 Rojas, 42: ``We have a 12-year-old girl. They wanted to take her.''

 As the likely candidate in her family, Elizabeth Sanabria, 14, is glad that her
 mother yanked her and a sister from the hamlet of San Carlos last summer and
 took them to Villavicencio, first living with friends then moving to the squatter
 settlement.

 ``If we had stayed there, I'd be in the guerrillas right now,'' Sanabria said, adding
 that many of her friends had to join. ``They say they like it. But they are told to
 say this. It comes out their lips, but it's not from their hearts.''

 While safe from recruitment, displaced children like Sanabria must put up with
 harsh conditions as internal refugees.

 It is children who often must become the breadwinners for their displaced families,
 experts say. Leaving their shanty homes each morning, they wash windshields
 and sell trinkets in towns, putting aside their schooling.

 ``Even if the child finds a place in a nearby school, he probably doesn't have
 shoes and has no money to buy books. The child doesn't have clothes. He begins
 to feel totally stigmatized by the other kids, and he drops out,'' Linares said.

 She said that at least 100,000 displaced children do not attend school at all.

 THE DRUG TRADE

 Children help pick cocoa leaves,
 a job suited to smaller hands

 Thousands of youngsters, meanwhile, have been drawn into the drug trade.
 Known as raspachines, or ``scrapers,'' the children pull coca leaves from bushes
 in Colombia, and harvest the milky gum from poppy flowers in the high Andes, a
 delicate job ill-suited to the large hands of adults.

 When U.S.-financed aerial fumigation planes swoop over the fields, the workers
 are often children.

 Further from the battle zones, children suffer equally insidious fallout from the
 conflict, experts say. Poor urban families find public resources for education and
 health care sapped by the war effort. Even kids from better-off families suffer.

 ``If you're a middle-class kid, there is the bunker mentality. . . . You are very
 highly controlled by parents concerned about your security,'' Kelsey said. ``You
 grow up being afraid to go out of the city to rural areas.''

 On average, a child is kidnapped every third day in Colombia. So children
 congregate at only a handful of malls in larger cities, or are taken to highly fortified
 private clubs.

 ``These have become the only places where kids feel comfortable hanging out and
 meeting their friends,'' Kelsey said.

 Without access to such limited safe areas, some children get sucked into crime.
 Following the demise of the Medellin cocaine cartel in the early 1990s, the city in
 northwest Colombia has been overrun by criminal gangs -- 138 by last count --
 that include some 8,000 youth members.

 The gangs, which are affiliated with a gamut of ideological and criminal factions,
 sometimes issue death sentences to minors if they don't join.

 ``I can go to other areas of the city -- just not to my own neighborhood,'' said John
 Fredy Ortiz, 15, who now lives in a church-run halfway house known as El Patio.

 ``Here,'' said Mauricio Giraldo, an El Patio program coordinator, ``some of these
 kids can't go home because their brother was a militia member, for example, and
 the militia may have lost power in their neighborhood, so the boy has to get lost,
 leave the area and come here to El Patio.''

 Or the youngster joins a criminal gang for protection. Youth delinquency has
 soared across Colombia. In 1996, authorities registered 35,000 criminal
 complaints against minors, a number that shot up to around 200,000 last year,
 Linares said.

 That trend augurs poorly should thousands of young warriors find the conflict over
 and have no economic alternative. Gutierrez, of the Child Welfare Institute, said
 she fears Colombia could follow the path of El Salvador, where civil war gave way
 to peace but juvenile crime soared, bringing the highest homicide rate in the
 hemisphere.

 ``This could happen to us if we don't prepare to receive these children,'' she said.
 ``Forget it. This could get out of hand.''