Carlos, who is 17 now, doesn't know how many people he killed and wounded
                 during his three and a half years with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
                 -- a 17,000-strong force known by the Spanish initials FARC. But now he says he
                 realizes that revenge brought no satisfaction and his years packing a rifle didn't
                 soothe the hurt caused by the murder of his aunt.

                 His first combat came one month after joining, and he lived rough in the jungle and
                 dodged bullets until finally his life as a guerrilla came to an end October 20, 2000.
                 That was the day that the army captured Carlos in a dusty village in northeastern
                 Colombia, when he ran out of bullets after fighting for four hours.

                 Now Carlos just wants to forget the war which has left him with a damaged pelvis
                 and shrapnel still dug into different parts of his body. His old wounds ache in the
                 high Andean cold where he now lives in the capital Bogota, in a safe house run by
                 the government's Colombian Family Welfare Institute.

                 Like many other child fighters taken prisoner, he was included in a program entitled
                 Boys and Girls Rehabilitated from the Armed Conflict. Since its commencement in
                 1997, some 740 former child fighters have passed through the program, which
                 usually lasts five months and which prepares them to return to civilian life.

                 The current batch of teen-agers live in groups of about 30 in five houses -- whose
                 locations are secret, for security reasons. Many of them can barely write their
                 name when they begin the program, which seeks to give them reading and writing
                 skills and offers them training in trades such as carpentry.

                 They also receive psychological counseling.

                 The United Nations believes that 6,000 minors are fighting for Colombia's illegal
                 armies of the left and the right, which are waging a war that has killed about 40,000
                 people in the past decade alone.

                 Despite suffering losses, too, the guerrillas have a steady supply of recruits. But
                 earlier this year, it recognized that some we re too young, and said that it would
                 stop accepting fighters less than 14 years old.

                 Carlos' voice trembles when he describes how a group of about 30 armed men
                 entered his aunt's general store and dragged her away together with a helper. The
                 two women's bodies were never found.

                 Carlos says the men who did it were members of a far-right paramilitary group. So
                 he went and joined the rebels, and in so doing became another example of the cycle
                 of violence that feeds Colombia's 37-year old war.

                 "I filled up with hatred of the paracos," he said, using the pejorative nickname for
                 the far-right fighters, "I left home and went to work in the mountains. But I was
                 depressed, I felt bad, so I went and joined the guerrillas."

                 Carlos says that he was fighting for social equality. But, asked about the meaning of
                 the word "democracy", he is baffled and laughed nervously.

                 He is little more coherent describing something of which he has far more direct
                 experience: killing people.

                 "You feel lots of things. When you kill, you don't feel anything. You think that at
                 last you've done something which has hurt the soldiers. The same that they feel
                 when they kill us," he said.

                 The institute's director, Juan Manuel Urrutia, says that his wards were the victims
                 of the armed groups that recruited them. But he added that the government should
                 not forget its own responsibility in a country where 40 percent of children grow up
                 in poverty.

                 The ranks of the young poor provide the war's cannon fodder and fingers to
                 squeeze the triggers in a country that is also ravaged by the struggle to overcome
                 the world's largest cocaine industry.

                 "We don't forget our responsibility, the state's responsibility, for letting those kids
                 be recruited," Urrutia said in his modest office.

                 The rehabilitation program costs $300-$500 per child per month, quite a lot of
                 money in a country where the minimum monthly wage is about $125.

                 Urrutia says that former child guerrillas are very disciplined, accustomed as they
                 are to following orders. But it takes quite a bit of work to build up their self-esteem
                 and convince them they can and should take decisions for themselves.

                 Ninety percent of the program's beneficiaries came from leftist guerrilla groups,
                 mainly the FARC. The rest were members of the far-right paramilitaries.

                 Occasionally, Urrutia says, the guerrilla groups send spies to join the program.
                 They sign up, sniff around, and then run away back to their jungle or mountain
                 bases to report on what's going on.

                 Many factors in this mixed-up country lead children to abandon poverty-stricken
                 homes and become guerrillas or paramilitary fighters.

                 "Some of the boys join up because they want to be like Rambo. The girls go
                 because they have a crush on some boy who's joined up, because they've been
                 jilted or because they think they will find affection and respect," said Urrutia.

                 Their reasons are not unlike those given by poor urban teen-agers who explain why
                 they join street gangs in blighted inner-cities U.S. neighborhoods.

                 Sixteen year-old Olga Contreras joined the FARC two years ago because her
                 brother joined and she missed him.

                 "They didn't want to take me because I was so small, but in the end they did
                 because they were looking to recruit," she said, speaking in a soft voice.

                 Since she was a little girl, growing up in Colombia's muggy eastern plains, she had
                 always liked weapons and uniforms, and wanted to be a guerrilla. There are plenty
                 of towns out there, lost in poverty, where bare-foot kids see the guerrillas march
                 past and form early ideas of glamour.

                 Defying her mother and stepfather, she ran away from school and began a
                 militarized, regimental existence, in which guerrilla commanders control everything
                 from the right to have a boyfriend to the times when fighters can bathe.

                 "There were lots of soldiers chasing after us and the only thing we did was run.
                 Towards the end I even hoped they would kill me so that I wouldn't have to suffer
                 any more. I cried all the time, I wasn't strong," she said.

                 She doesn't like to remember what she has seen -- the wounded and the dead. Or
                 the contraceptive coil they made her use to avoid pregnancy.

                 Seventeen-year old Manuel Restrepo's story is different. He didn't want to become
                 a guerrilla at all, but left his mother's coffee farm to travel to Colombia's south to
                 work picking coca leaf -- the raw material for cocaine.

                 Things went well and he was soon earning $250 a month -- until the local FARC
                 guerrillas told him to clear out of the coca region because he was a stranger. After
                 eight days, unable to work, running out of money and unable to put together
                 enough to pay for a bus fare home, he decided that the only way he would be able
                 to survive would be to join the guerrillas.

                 After 12 months he had had more than enough of rebel life and, taking advantage of
                 the confusion of a blazing army attack, managed to run away with a friend.

                 Now, after seven months in the program, Manuel is almost ready to go home. War
                 may have finished with his innocence, but not with his desire to live.

                 "War doesn't help anything. Just makes other people suffer," he said.

                 But Carlos too has other things on his mind now. Despite his youth, he has an
                 infant daughter he has never seen, whom he fathered before running away to the
                 FARC. He says he wants to go and find her and bring her some toys.

                  Copyright 2001 Reuters.