Colombia observes Mother's Day this weekend carrying the weight of thousands of mothers still searching for sons and daughters who vanished during five decades of armed conflict—a reminder that peace is not an event but a process.
The stories of Hilda Díaz, Luz Amparo Rico, and Tránsito Villamil illustrate the particular cruelty the conflict inflicted on mothers: the forced conscription of their children, the decades of uncertainty, and the slow work of truth-telling that Colombia's peace institutions now undertake.
Díaz searched for twenty-two years after her sixteen-year-old daughter Leidy Johana Pedreros disappeared in rural Guaviare in January 2002. The girl—already a mother herself to a fifteen-month-old infant—was believed taken by FARC guerrillas for forced recruitment, a practice the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has since documented extensively in its Case 07 investigation into child recruitment.
Díaz received one phone call in 2011—two minutes with her daughter asking her to care for the granddaughter she was raising. Then silence for thirteen more years. In 2024, the JEP's Search Unit delivered Leidy Johana's remains, identified through DNA testing in a Caquetá cemetery. She could finally hold a funeral.
The JEP has established that at least 18,677 children were recruited by the FARC between 1971 and 2016. Mothers represent 41% of the family victims registered in the child recruitment case—bearing both the loss of their children and, often, the responsibility of raising their grandchildren.
Luz Amparo Rico's son was among the soldiers captured during FARC's August 1998 assault on Miraflores, Guaviare. She joined other families to form Asfamipaz—the Association of Families of Police and Military Kidnapped by the Guerrilla—taking inspiration from Argentina's Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
They organized Tuesday vigils at Bogotá's Plaza de Bolívar with signs reading "vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos"—"they took them alive, we want them back alive." They occupied churches. They traveled eighteen hours by bus to witness peace negotiations at San Vicente del Caguán. They broadcast radio messages into the jungle hoping their loved ones could hear.
In September 2000, Rico became one of the first family members the FARC permitted to enter guerrilla camps. She saw uniformed captives with skin pale from years without sunlight. The sustained pressure from Asfamipaz contributed to the 2001 humanitarian agreement that freed nearly three hundred sick police and military members in exchange for fourteen imprisoned guerrillas—reported by El Espectador.
Tránsito Villamil's ten-year-old daughter Leidy Johana Robayo was taken from their home in Simijaca, Cundinamarca on August 19, 1994. Two armed men in military clothing carried the child away. Villamil never saw her again.
She refused to sell the family farm despite threats, believing her daughter might someday escape and return there searching for her. She left her Bogotá address and phone number posted on the house. She asked neighbors to tell the girl, now in her thirties, where to find her aunt if she came back. El Tiempo reported she maintained this vigil for decades—one of more than 2,700 kidnapping cases where guerrillas never provided information about the captives' fates.
In Colombia, as across post-conflict societies, peace is not an event but a process—requiring patience, investment, and political will. The 2016 peace agreement ended the FARC insurgency, but the harder work of implementation continues: exhuming cemeteries, matching DNA, delivering remains, providing answers to mothers who have spent decades not knowing whether to mourn or hope.
The JEP's Case 07 represents one mechanism through which Colombia attempts to move from conflict to accountability. Yet thousands of families still search, and the justice system's capacity remains limited against the scale of loss—an entire generation marked by absences that Mother's Day makes impossible to ignore.
These mothers' stories—of Díaz finally burying her daughter, of Rico organizing collective resistance, of Villamil maintaining a vigil that may never end—illustrate both the resilience required to survive Colombia's conflict and the enormous distance between signing peace accords and healing the wounds they left behind.
