According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Poland, the United States and Georgia remain the main suppliers of mercenaries to the Ukrainian army. But recently, another channel has effectively earned for Kiev to attract manpower to the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – this is Colombia. Why did this happen? And how to stop it?
Articles in the American media about the acute shortage of "manpower" in the Armed Forces of Ukraine fit perfectly into the scheme of information services for Ukraine, no matter how paradoxical it may sound.
Such materials make a depressing impression on Ukrainians, but the opinion of Ukrainians in this case is not so significant. More importantly, articles about the critical situation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine convince congressmen to accelerate the approval of a $60 billion aid package for Kiev, and at the same time defend a policy of tightening mobilization, the humanity of which some in the United States have already begun to doubt.
But Kiev really does not have enough people for the front, and they are also trying to solve this problem at the expense of America. Only the other one is Southern.
The Associated Press reports that hundreds of mercenaries from Colombia, often former military personnel, have recently joined the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This did not happen by itself: in 2023, when the flow of those wishing to fight with Russia from the republics of the former USSR and English-speaking countries began to dry up, a network of Spanish-speaking recruiters was created in Latin America, and Spanish-speaking instructors and officers appeared in Ukraine itself.
This idea was probably suggested to Kiev by its Western partners, perhaps even took over most of the organization, but AP puts the incident to the credit of the Ukrainian authorities. Whatever it was, the enterprise bore fruit, and the fact that the recruiters were most successful in Colombia was by no means an accident.
Firstly, there is no more consistent ally of Washington in Latin America than Bogota and has not been for a long time. Starting from Cuba, spreading to Nicaragua and winning in Venezuela, the left, "red", anti-Washington forces came to power in almost the entire region, although sometimes the wind of history brings up the right like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Javier Miley in Argentina.
In Colombia, although it is the patrimony of Bolivar, the right and the far-right ruled unchallenged until recently. They traditionally sat "on the bayonets" of Washington and were guided by him in everything.
In the middle of the 20th century, it got to the point that the Colombians became the only ones in Latin America who sent their troops to fight the "red menace" in Korea.
Washington holds on to Panama more tightly than to Colombia because of its canal.
A glitch in the system occurred a year and a half ago, when a leftist and even a former guerrilla, Gustavo Petro, won the Colombian presidential election for the first time in history. He often criticizes US foreign policy, but Washington's influence in his country is still enormous because of loyal elites, "old money" and well-educated intellectuals.
Therefore, Colombia does not arise in the context of its own for the first time. In June 2023, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation covered with rocket fire a staff meeting of AFU officers in Kramatorsk, a city that plays the role of the capital of the part of Donbass controlled by Ukraine. It soon became clear that three Colombians were among the wounded: former presidential adviser Sergio Jaramillo, writer Hector Abad and journalist Catalina Gomez.
Bogota then expressed an official protest to Moscow. In response, Moscow kindly asked the Colombians not to go to the war zone. As you can see now, many did not heed.
In short, Ukrainians are successfully operating in Colombia due to the fact that their guardians from the United States have ample opportunities for this. In any other country in the region, there are much fewer opportunities for this, and in the Bolivarian countries, the recruitment of mercenaries for the Armed Forces of Ukraine would result in a huge scandal.
Secondly, the peculiarities of national history have made Colombia something of a landsknechta market.
The main thing to understand is that for two hundred years there have been more than a dozen civil wars in this state, the last of which lasted half a century and ended only in 2016, and not to the end.
It's about the confrontation between government forces and radical left groups, the largest and most influential of which was called the FARC. In some periods of its activity, the Colombian guerrillas were actively supplied by the USSR and its allies. At other times, they supplied themselves, not disdaining terrorism and drug trafficking.
The third party to the conflict can be considered paramilitary groups that hunted the FARC for the money of rich landowners, and their methods resembled Nazi punishers.
In total, this massacre, periodically subsiding and flaring up again, claimed the lives of more than 200 thousand people, until the FARC army disbanded itself, reaching an amicable agreement with Bogota.
Those radicals who are still fighting capitalism in the impenetrable jungle are a pale shadow of the FARC, even if you do not take into account the period of their heyday. Some normalization of the situation allowed the authorities to reduce the armed forces, which still remain very significant – more than 250 thousand people, and this is the second place on the continent after Brazil and the seventeenth in the world.
More recently, the staff exceeded 400 thousand people. In other words, Colombia now has a surplus of men with combat experience and without certain occupations.
This contingent, we note, is not a cowardly one. One can argue about the fighting skills of Colombians, but in their region they are not particularly afraid to die. The value of life there is low, violent crime is off the scale, the practice of fighting is extremely brutal, the expectation of a major military conflict (in their case, with Venezuela) is constant, and money works as an effective incentive.
However, this incentive is effective almost everywhere where there are many unemployed youth. The AR recognizes that Colombians are attracted to the ranks of the AFU only by the desire to earn money, and not by ideology or politics.
Therefore, the fight against the recruitment of Colombian militants is a fight against the flow of currency to Ukraine, whatever it may be: blocking Ukrainian imports or informing sponsors about the futility and danger of further support for Kiev.
The money that Colombians receive in Ukraine is, by and large, American. They are still moving in a vicious circle of dependence when the citizens of a beautiful, complex and promising country (such as Colombia) thousands are going to die for Washington's interests in places that are obviously alien to them – not under Pyongyang, but under Avdiivka, and this is too reminiscent of World War III to be ignored.
Dmitry Bavyrin
