Writer/Tiger Knife
One night in early June 2021, Mauricio Javier Romero, a Colombian veteran who had served in the army for 20 years, received a call from a friend in the former army.
According to Romero's wife, the friend wanted to introduce him to a job — a "legal" and "safe" job that would require traveling to a foreign country.
"This person guarantees that the job won't be in trouble," she said, "it's a great opportunity to develop and increase your income — and he says my husband is a great professional, so hopefully he'll join the team." ”
A month later, Romero, 45, was killed on suspicion of killing Haitian President Moiz, a case that caused a sensation in the international community.
Colombia has now confirmed the direct involvement of 21 Colombian citizens in the assassinations, of whom 18 were captured by the Haitian police and 3 died in the process of arrest.
As the investigation into the assassination of the President of Haiti deepens, a huge shadow of Colombia, the global mercenary factory, begins to emerge.
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Late one night in November 2010, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian military personnel landed in the UAE capital. Led by local intelligence officials, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove about 20 miles to a military base in the desert.
These Colombian servicemen entered the UAE as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers of a secret U.S.-led mercenary army built by Eric Prince, the founder of The American Blackwater Corporation, with $529 million from the United Arab Emirates.
Since 2010, the UAE has employed a total of about 1,800 Colombian mercenaries through Blackwater and organized them into the so-called "Colombian Brigades", stationed in several desert camps within zayed military city.
This is not the first time that Colombian mercenaries have entered the international community. Back in 2004, U.S. Security hired the first Colombian veterans as mercenaries on missions to the United Arab Emirates.
Initially, the UAE may have hired these mercenaries solely to protect key facilities in the UAE, occasionally participating in merchant ship guards, and being responsible for suppressing possible riots by a large number of foreign workers in the UAE.
From 2010 to 2015, the main task of these Colombian mercenaries in the desert camps was to train. They get up at 5 a.m. every morning and receive training from European and American instructors, including shooting, navigation, and riot control. The camp was in better living conditions, a Colombian cook was specially hired, and mercenaries could access the Internet in the camp, but they could not post any photos of the camp and were not allowed to leave the camp.
In 2014, when the war broke out in Yemen, these mercenaries took to the front lines of the war for the first time and participated directly in the war. In October of the same year, the first 100 Colombian mercenaries arrived in Yemen to fight in Yemen.
Compared with the previous task of protecting some of the local equipment and facilities, the obvious risk factor of entering the war has increased greatly, but these mercenaries are still willing to go to the front line, for the simple reason that there is money to be made.
Colombian mercenaries can only earn about $400 to $500 a month for service in their home countries, while serving in the UAE can earn $3,000 a month, and especially good people can get $18,000.
If they go to Yemen to fight, they will receive an additional $1,000 a week in subsidies. This means that Colombian mercenaries who go to War in Yemen earn $6,000 to $7,000 a month, more than ten times the income of their own country.
However, this figure is still far lower than the income of mercenaries in developed countries such as britain and the United States. According to media reports, the average daily wage of U.S. or British mercenaries during the same period was $1,000 — the former chairman of the U.S. House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee once said: "[This] revenue has surpassed that of the secretary of defense." ”
In addition to being cheap and cheap, veterans from Colombia, especially the mercenary market, are particularly attracted by the mercenary market because they are indeed very capable.
Most of these veterans have 20 years of professional military careers and are well trained in dealing with challenges, as no other country in the world has concentrated almost all types of challenges as Colombia.
Colombia's nearly 60 years of internal conflict have provided a rich training ground for the military. Trained to fight guerrillas, terrorism and drug trafficking, they can survive in wet tropical jungles or deserts; they are members of the nation's elite forces, responsible for the rescue of big men and guardians of the country's critical infrastructure.
However, these servicemen face a very real problem after they end their military service around the age of 40 – no money. In addition to getting a very meager pension, their main career choice after switching jobs is to become a baker or mason.
So the options before them are very limited – join a foreign security company, work for two years, make enough money and then return to live at home.
According to the Association of Retired Officers of the Colombian Army, between 10,000 and 15,000 soldiers leave the army and perform compulsory military service each year. The Colombian Association of Professional Soldiers and Marines says 6,000 professional soldiers retire each year. But there are no official figures on how many people work for security companies abroad.
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In fact, there is another important reason why Colombian mercenaries are popular in the international market: they are trained by the Americans - military quality and ability are guaranteed.
In terms of professional military building in Colombia, the help of the U.S. Columbia Project is crucial.
In 1997, Colombia became the world's largest producer of cocaine. Faced with the growing harm of drug production and smuggling to the United States, in 1999 the Clinton administration began to implement the strategy of aiding the "Columbia Project" proposed by the United States.
At first, the plan was mainly used to fight drugs, but after the 911 incident, the US foreign policy began to take an important turn, counter-terrorism became the focus of its diplomatic strategy, in 2002, the US State Department explicitly listed Colombia's two major anti-government guerrilla organizations - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army and the United Self-Defense Forces as international terrorist organizations, and the US policy towards Colombia began to shift to counter-terrorism and anti-drug campaigns.
From 2000 to 2016, the United States provided more than $10 billion to support the Colombian military through the Colombian Program, the vast majority of which was used for military aid and training government forces. With the financial assistance of the United States, the number of Colombian government troops has increased significantly, and military equipment and combat capabilities have improved significantly.
The U.S. involvement in Colombia doesn't stop there, in addition to giving money, it will also give people.
The U.S. Army's relationship with its Colombian counterpart dates back decades. U.S. and Colombian forces forged a close partnership during the Korean War, when Columbia was the only South American country to support its U.N. mission, deploying about 20 percent of its military manpower.
After the end of the Korean War, the then president of Colombia asked the U.S. Army to help establish a school modeled on the U.S. Army Ranger School, providing Colombian soldiers with the same training courses as the U.S. Military, which was later established as the Columbia Lancero.
Arguably, the Lancello School shaped the Colombian Army — and the fate of the Colombian nation — just as the U.S. Army Ranger School shaped the U.S. Army.
Since then, the United States has continued to invest in the development of Lancello School. The initial exchange eventually turned into a military personnel exchange program, with U.S. officers serving as guest lecturers and liaisons at the Lancello Military Academy for one to two years, while Colombian officers also traveled to the U.S. Army Ranger School as part of the exchange.
After the demolition of the U.S. Army's Jungle Warfare Training Center in Panama in 1999, there has been a lack of opportunities to train in South American jungle conditions. At this time, Colombia undoubtedly offers an excellent alternative, and in recent decades the U.S. military has been working closely with the Lancello Military Academy, and Lancello has even begun to recruit American students every year and offer them tailor-made bush training courses.
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By the beginning of the 21st century, when these elite veterans were facing retirement difficulties, it was American companies that stepped forward and sold them to the international mercenary market at a low price.
In this link, Blackwater is an important player that must be mentioned.
On the Battlefield in the Middle East, Blackwater may not be the largest mercenary company, nor the most profitable, but it is definitely the closest to the core of the White House and Capitol Hill.
Decades ago, Blackwater was still unknown, and since the United States opened the "war on terror" front in the Middle East, when American tanks entered Iraq in 2003, the White House replaced international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts, bringing with them the largest "private contractor" army ever deployed in war.
In the three years from 2004 to 2007, Blackwater's "diplomatic security" contracts with the State Department alone totaled more than $750 million. The company used the money to build private armies that could rival or even outperform the armies of many countries around the world.
Blackwater has deployed personnel in nine countries, more than 21,000 people on standby, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and the world's largest private military facility , a 7,000-acre compound.
The man behind the empire is Eric Prince, 52, a conservative Christian who served in the U.S. Navy's Special Forces and made significant campaign contributions to President Bush and his allies.
Blackwater's senior executives include the former CIA's head of counterterrorism; the former deputy director of the CIA; the former Pentagon inspector general; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Blackwater executives have boasted that some of the work they do for the government is so sensitive that the company can't tell one federal agency what it's doing for another.
The rise of private security companies like Blackwater means that the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens and the citizens of its allies to staff the war, nor does it need to provide draft war implementation, and just as importantly, it reduces the number of "official" casualties. In Iraq alone, more than 900 U.S. security company employees were killed and another 13,000 injured. Most of them were not U.S. citizens, and these figures do not count toward the official death toll.
This would seem to delude itself into reducing the uneasiness and anxiety that Americans feel about their own losses.
In Iraq, where many hiring companies are run by Americans or Britons, elite troops are made up of well-trained army veterans for sensitive operations or operations. At the lower levels, however, these teams are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals.
One of the most popular and main sources is veterans from Colombia.
Ironically, as mentioned earlier, their popularity in this international market is also inseparable from the United States.
In 2008, Blackwater shot 17 Iraqi civilians in the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, causing an uproar, and then the scandal-ridden Blackwater changed its name to Xe, and its business was fragmented and scattered among its subsidiaries.
In 2021, the Haitian president was assassinated by a team of Colombian mercenaries, and it was pulled out that it was related to a Miami-based CTU security company.
Whether the CTU is related to the renamed Blackwater is still unknown, but the Pentagon's latest statement said that the Colombians involved in it had received U.S. military training, and that many of the suspects involved had been informants of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Behind the presidential assassination case, the truth is still unclear, the huge dark shadow of the United States has once again surfaced.
Some media commented that the assassination of the President of Haiti and the investigation of the culprits behind the scenes are far more important than catching several killers.
(Image from the Internet)