To jail alias Frankly, alleged underage recruiter of FARC dissidents

On the morning of Saturday, April 9, the Attorney General's Office managed to get a guarantee judge to impose an assurance measure in a prison center, against Frankly Gómez Jara, alias Frankly, who would be the recruiter of minors of the Jorge Briceño Suárez substructure of the FARC dissidents.

The investigating body assured that the evidentiary material submitted to the court could show that this man, supposedly, promised to study and work children and adolescents to involve them in criminal activities. There would also be evidence of his involvement in attacks and killings against members of the security forces.

The investigation would show that the victims of this character were focused on municipalities in the department of Meta. Among the criminal activities that minors would have to carry out would be the collection of extortion, sale and trafficking of narcotics, as well as the transport of weapons and explosives.

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When he managed to get the minors to agree to go to the guerrilla camps, later, alias Frankly subjected them with threats and aggressions so that they would not escape. On the other hand, the Prosecutor's Office would have evidence that the defendant today murdered two young people who were in a commercial establishment in Brazil, in La Uribe (Meta), on July 22, 2018.

In its Bulletin 43457, the entity reported that the defector from the Peace Agreement was one of those responsible for a terrorist attack on a vehicle where ten members of the security forces were mobilizing. This event would have been presented in La Uribe on December 1, 2018. After the explosion of the charge, two uniformed men were severely injured.

For these events, a prosecutor from the Specialized Directorate Against Criminal Organizations charged Frankly Gómez Jara with the crimes of: aggravated homicide, unlawful recruitment, concert to commit an aggravated crime and terrorism. The defendant was captured in an articulated work of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the National Army, the Colombian Air Force and the National Police.

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For its part, the Office of the Ombudsman highlighted in its first report of 2022 submitted on 11 February, that from March 2020 to date, there are reports of 114 cases of forced recruitment, use and use of children and adolescents for war purposes.

For the Public Prosecutor's Office, FARC dissidents are the criminal group with the highest number of reported cases. 68.3% of the events would be linked to their structures. While the ELN records 6.5 per cent of cases, while 4.7 per cent are attributed to self-defense groups and 8.4 per cent to other illegal armed groups.

The departments with the highest number of reported cases are Caqueta (33), Cauca (18), Antioquia (9), Putumayo (10) and Tolima (8). In addition, 24 per cent of the victims belong to ethnic populations; 4 per cent to the population of African descent and 20 per cent to indigenous peoples. And of all cases, 83% occurred in rural areas.

So far in 2022, two early warnings related to this risk have been issued, in Putumayo and Valle del Cauca. “We understand that it is the lives of girls and boys who are being deprived of the possibility of fulfilling their dreams. State, family and society must be committed to preventing them from continuing to be victims of violence and particularly recruitment, which is one of the most aberrant behaviors committed against children in our country,” said the Ombudsman, Carlos Camargo, in the presentation of that report.

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