Colombian ex-soldier, mercenary market workforce | International

The assassination of the President of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, is a puzzle that lacks pieces and will have to be put together between Haiti and Colombia at least three months ago, when the first offers of recruitment to the Colombian ex-soldiers appeared.

Wednesday July 7, while in Port-au-Prince reigned chaos after the assassination of the president, one of the suspects, the former Colombian soldier, Duberney Capador, communicated with his family. At 11:30 a.m., he spoke with his sister Yenny to tell her he was stuck. “He told me that they had arrived late for the person I was supposed to take care of, that they were being shot and that they were going to negotiate the exit,” Yenny Capador told EL PAÍS by phone. from Quindío in Colombia.

Her last communication – she recounts – was at 5:31 p.m. that day, when she assured him that she was fine and asked if they had seen the news, and although she wrote to him at the dawn on Thursday morning, she could no longer find an answer. “At Easter (April), they called him to hire him in a very good and important security company to go to Haiti,” said the woman who learned on television that her brother, with first sergeant Mauricio Romero Medina, was one of the dead. . She asks the Colombian government to help her repatriate the body. So far, Haitian Police have identified 28 involved, 26 Colombians and two Americans of Haitian descent. Of the former Colombian soldiers, 20 were arrested, three died and the rest are still at large.

Capador’s story is similar to that told by other relatives of those captured by Haitian police who are accused of the assassination. From a security agency they were offered $ 2,700 per month to deal with important people, they did not give them any information about where they would be assigned, they were being trained and hosted in a country house in Haiti. Colombian police have identified four companies that paid for plane tickets and remain on the island, but they did not reveal more details and it is not clear if there was a signed contract that proves this. which was said by relatives of the military.

The profile of the person indicated

The only thing that is clear is the profile of the Colombians accused of the assassination: they were all servicemen with a lot of experience as special forces and trained even in the United States. Recently retired from the service – between 2018 and 2020 they ceased to be active in the military – they were between 40 and 45 years old and would have received a job offer from abroad.

According to several of their relatives, they would do what is common to retired soldiers of this profile: join security companies abroad, work two years and return home to live with a little more than the money their pension gives them. . In other words, join the mercenary companies that are nurtured by the ranks of trained soldiers from the Colombian army. Over the past decades, the most common destinations have been Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

“Recruiting ex-servicemen to go to other parts of the world as mercenaries has been a long-standing problem, but there is no rule that prohibits or prevents it,” the general said. Luis Fernando Navarro, Commander of the Military Forces. “There is a significant number of former Colombian soldiers in Dubai,” he adds. Navarro ensures that they have an internal program to motivate these ex-soldiers to stay in Colombia because they know that “by crossing borders in this type of activity”, they can find themselves immersed in situations like Haiti.

After decades of armed conflict, the Colombian army is highly trained and has become a sought-after commodity in the mercenary market. Each year, according to the Colombian Association of Retired Officers of the Military Forces (Acore), between 10,000 and 15,000 soldiers leave the military to perform their compulsory military service. While the Colombian Association of Professional Soldiers and Marines Retired and Retired from Military Forces, claims that there are 6,000 professional soldiers who retire each year. There are no figures on the number of people working in overseas security companies.

In the case of Haiti, there are non-commissioned officers to professional soldiers. The highest ranking is Lieutenant-Colonel Carlos Giovanny Guerrero, who in In 2016, he became commander of the Mariscal Antonio José de Sucre infantry battalion, originally from Chiquinquirá (Boyacá). In the painting presented by the Colombian police, he appears with a blow to the face.

Sergeant Capador also passed through Boyacá, a department in central Colombia, and this could be the place where the recruitment of several ex-soldiers took place. The wife of Francisco Eladio Uribe, a professional soldier captured in Haiti, assured that it was the sergeant who had made the offer. “My husband worked in the Chiquinquirá battalion before retiring in 2019, he accepted the offer because it came from people I trusted,” he told local radio. Uribe is under investigation for an extrajudicial execution that occurred in 2008.

Although we already know the route these ex-soldiers took to reach Haiti, via the Dominican Republic, their level of participation in the assassination is not yet clear. According to anonymous sources from the newspaper EL TIEMPO, the ex-soldiers fell into a trap. “The hypothesis according to which the former soldier could have been deceived stems from several questions asked by experts in the field. The main one: why did they not leave Port-au-Prince after having assassinated the president? », Specifies the newspaper. And he joins the voices of Haitian politicians who wonder why none of the president’s security guards were injured.

In Quindío, Yenny Capador hopes that his brother’s case will be clarified. As proof that he had been hired – he says – he has only one photo in which we see him with the shirt of CTU Security, a security company based in Miami, another city which adds to the puzzle of the ‘investigation.

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