This paper measures the impact of strengthening the security policy on the rural labor market in Colombia by exploiting the structural change in the number of rural seizures. The new policy produced dissimilar effects across gender, age-groups, and types of occupation. For adults, especially for women, there were important reductions in the labor participation, with simultaneous reductions in the income across the most representative types of workers, self-employees and day-laborers. For male youths and children there was an increase in the labor participation through the day-labor activities, while females seemed to participate less as self-employees. In general, there was a socioeconomic loss in terms of reductions of adult’s labor supply and income, while for youths and children there is a differentiated effect by gender in the labor participation, and no significant connections were found with school enrollment.
