When my friend Jacques told me a couple of weeks ago about the seizure of Colombian children by right- and left-wing military groups, I wondered why I hadn't read more about the issue. Today, the disappearance of "sons, fathers, mothers, brothers" in Colombia is front-page news in the New York Times.

"Colombia Unearthing Plight of Its 'Disappeared'" focuses on the scores of bodies being dug up in cattle country close to the Caribbean. The article says that right-wing paramilitary groups were responsible for these deaths, particularly a group called "Heroes of the Maria Mountains." Colombian authorities claim that the "Heroes" were de facto drug traffickers who paid off local officials and seized poor farmer's land to control the territory, which is used to move cocaine northwards.

"With dozens of people coming forward in recent months to complain of missing relatives, government and military officials now estimate that hundreds of poor farmers may have been killed and secretly buried in a terror campaign that began in the late 1990's," the Times reports.

This is slightly different than the enslavement of teens that Jacques told me about, but it's all cut from the same cloth. I spoke to my friend Carlos, who maintains close ties to his large family in Colombia, about this phenomena late last week. He said that it was his understanding that FARC, the largest of the "left-wing" guerilla groups, was more actively engaged in seizing children than the "right-wing" groups. He promised to point me to more information on the subject when he returns from vacation.

The nominal political orientation of those responsible is irrelevant to the families of the victims, of course. The missing and dead are innocent bystanders of a war that at this point has as much to do with internal Colombian politics as a shootout over who gets to sell crack on a particular street corner in the south Bronx.