the dark plot targeting Colombian mercenaries and how much they would have been paid

They fight in Yemen or Afghanistan, monitor pipelines in the Arab Emirates and even arm plots in Haiti. Hardened by half a century of internal conflict, retired Colombian military personnel and illegal fighters are fueling the grim mercenaries in the world.

Twenty-six Colombians accused by Haitian authorities of having participated in the assassination of the president Jovenel Moise early Wednesday morning at his residence.

Bogotá said at least 17 of its former soldiers would be involved in the attack, of which 15 were captured and two were killed by Haitian forces.

The alleged involvement of Colombian mercenaries highlights a lucrative transnational market.

“There is a great experience in terms of irregular warfare. The Colombian soldier is trained, has combat experience and is also cheap labor,” Jorge Mantilla, investigator on criminal phenomena at the University of Illinois at Chicago. . .

It is not only retired military personnel crossing the borders of Colombia, the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, use violence for pay.

In May 2004, Venezuelan authorities arrested “153 Colombian paramilitaries” whom they accused of being part of a plan to assassinate then-president Hugo Chávez.

retired military

Colombia is an inexhaustible reserve of soldiers. Some 220,000 officers make up the Armed Forces and thousands of them retire due to lack of promotion opportunities, misconduct or because they served 20 years.

Each year “between 15,000 and 10,000 soldiers leave our ranks of the army (…) it is a human universe which is very difficult to control”, declared Colonel John Marulanda, president of the Colombian Association of retired military officers (Acore), in an interview with W Radio.

They retire relatively young with low pensions and this makes them “in the throes of better economic opportunities,” the retired official added.

Suspicions in Haiti

According to him, what happened in Haiti is a “typical recruitment case” former Colombian soldiers by private companies to conduct operations in other countries.

According to Colombian authorities, there would be four companies involved in the assassination of the president.

A woman who introduced herself as the partner of Francisco Eladio Uribe, one of the captured Colombians, said a business had made her husband an offer of $ 2,700 to join the order.

Uribe retired from the military in 2019 and is linked to legal proceedings for the so-called “false positives” scandal, in which the military executed more than 6,000 civilians between 2002 and 2008 to pass them off as wounded in combat in exchange for advantages.

In May 2011, the newspaper The New York Times revealed that a plane with dozens of former Colombian military personnel landed in Abu Dhabi to join an army of mercenaries hired by the American firm Blackwater to guard important assets for the United Arab Emirates.

The same newspaper revealed in 2015 that hundreds of Colombians were fighting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, now contracted directly by the Emirates.

“Boom” of the mercenary industry

For Mantilla, for a decade “there has been a boom in this industry”.

At this time, the United States began to replace its troops in the Middle East with “private security companies because they involve a lower political cost in terms of losses and a gray area in international law”.

Before the eventual human rights violations, “Legal responsibility will be assumed by the authors of the material” and not by the state or the company which hired them, notes the analyst.

Today there is a global market where American, English, French, Belgian and Danish companies recruit mercenaries mainly in Latin America or in countries plagued by armed conflicts such as Zimbabwe and Nepal.

“Businesses are legal, but that doesn’t mean that all of these people’s activities are strictly legal,” Mantilla concludes.

Source: AFP

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