Found 23 bodies of young Bogota residents in the northern province of Norte de Santander.

Bogota, where poverty, unemployment and violence abound, have become centers for recruiting young men by armed groups that, in many cases, end up getting them killed.
The alarm was sounded this week with the discovery of 23 bodies of young Bogota residents in the northern province of Norte de Santander. The young men had been tricked into joining criminal organizations.The Attorney General's Office said Friday that these men had disappeared from slums south of the Colombian capital after having received what were supposedly job offers.A few days before, an official with the National Ombudsman's Office, Jorge Enrique Calero, had become aware of the problem and asked locals to be wary of Bogota bus stations, areas where the victims were told to go to be transported to other regions of the country for work.Also suspected are the drug-trafficking mafias, which on many occasions work hand in hand with the paramilitaries.The secretary of the Bogota municipal government, Clara Lopez, said this week that the slain young men were victims of "forced disappearance for the purpose of homicide" after being recruited by illegal groups.
"They didn't die in combat," Lopez said quoting the army, which based its comment on the brief lapse between the time they were reported missing and their supposed death in clashes with security forces."These guys were confined in the Colombian capital and two days later at most they were already in combat, armed, organized, in confrontations, on different dates," a Bogota municipal official said.Most of these young men came from Ciudad Bolivar, a sprawling neighborhood on Bogota's south side full of vacant lots and made up of 300 districts with 700,000 inhabitants. The shantytown has expanded in recent years thanks to the arrival of thousands of people displaced by the war that started in the 1980s.Unemployment in Ciudad Bolivar is around 45 percent of the population and more than half of the families live on about a dollar a day, according to Leonidas Ospina, academic secretary of the Cerros del Sur Institute, the school in Potosi, one of the area's poorest sectors.
In an interview with Efe, Ospina said that the rootlessness of the displaced persons, the prevalence of drug use, unemployment and the lack of family surroundings since parents have to work outside the home all day, make Ciudad Bolivar the perfect place to recruit young men for the mafias.
With regard to recruiting men for the mafias, he said that "it has been happening and will continue to happen as long as society doesn't offer these guys any other possibilities."Ospina said that in the last few years between 200 and 300 young men have died in Potosi, an area with only 12,000 inhabitants."Many who have lost their lives were linked to these groups that only get them put in jail or killed," he said, adding that "there have been times where every eight days some two or three guys have been killed."He also mentioned the vulnerability of these families when they decide to report the disappearance of their kids because "unfortunately, we have discovered that the authorities themselves are part of the mafia."
Ciudad Bolivar is therefore a breeding ground for the recruiting of young men, who in their eagerness to find jobs and have a better life find death at the hands of drug traffickers, paramilitaries or gangs of unscrupulous criminals.