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The Andean Shadow Army

How Colombia became the world’s primary reservoir of mercenary manpower

José Niño Unfiltered| September 14, 2026

A few weeks ago Russians with Attitude, posted a blunt prediction after Abelardo de la Espriella won Colombia’s presidency in June.

“It was already bad under Gustavo Petro who didn’t do anything to stop it but at least verbally denounced the outflow of Colombian mercenaries. De la Espriella will likely actively support American-Ukrainian recruitment efforts. There’s already many thousands of them (with around 1,000 confirmed killed). I suspect flooding the Ukrainian army with Third World meat will be the focus of US strategy to solve Kiev’s manpower problems. It’s already the publicly declared Ukrainian strategy.”

Hot take aside, there’s considerable truth behind RWA’s commentary. Colombia now supplies more foreign fighters to Ukraine than any other nation on earth, and it did not arrive at that position overnight.

The International Federation for Human Rights estimates that 2,000 to 3,000 Colombians joined the Ukrainian army as contract soldiers. The Defense Post reported in November 2025 that Ukraine had signed roughly 2,000 Colombians on military contracts, citing the German daily Die Welt. Writing for the Atlantic Council in February 2026, Erin K. McFee noted that official figures do not exist and put Colombians at roughly 25 percent of all personnel drawn from the 65 countries that have joined Kiev’s ground forces. Petro pushed the number far higher, telling Colombians in May 2026 that 7,000 men were fighting and dying in a war that was not theirs.

Citing former Ukrainian economy minister Tymofiy Mylovanov, Petro wrote on X on May 5, 2026, in a post that translates as “There are 7,000 men from Colombia with military training, fighting in a foreign war and dying without cause in Ukraine. We do not want to export death. The mercenary is prohibited by law.”

However uncertain the head count, the body count is harder to dispute. Colombia’s Foreign Ministry gave El Tiempo figures published on June 9, 2026, and current through May, showing 670 Colombians missing and 173 dead across both sides. Of the dead, 140 died in Ukraine, and 130 of those bodies have already come home in coffins, while consular officials in Russia confirmed 33 more using information the Russian government supplied. Of the missing, Ukraine’s armed forces declared 446 lost in combat, families reported another 56, and the Moscow consulate logged 168. The ministry then undercut the totals, explaining in Spanish that Colombian citizens travel to conflict zones individually and without notifying Colombian authorities, so the available figures do not necessarily reflect the full scope of the phenomenon.

Independent estimates fill that gap and they run grim. Writing for the Atlantic Council, Erin K. McFee put Colombian deaths on Ukraine’s side at 300 to 550, citing El País. In a Kiev memorial park, Colombian flags now form a striking patch in a dense blanket of tributes to the fallen. Colombians have lost more men in Ukraine’s International Legion than any other foreign nationality, with Americans second at roughly 100 killed. McFee interviewed a Colombian veteran in Kiev in late 2025 who delivered a warning stripped of romance. “Tell Colombians not to go there, because more die than return.”

The dead accumulate in single afternoons as much as in slow attrition. On July 21, 2025, a Russian missile struck the dining hall of a training camp near Kropyvnytskyi at lunchtime. The New York Times reported that at least a dozen foreign volunteers died, among them citizens of the United States, Colombia, Taiwan and Denmark, and an anonymous American recruit from Florida described seeing at least 15 dead and more than 100 wounded. The unit hit was the International Legion run by Ukraine’s military intelligence, whose spokesman said official casualty figures would stay sealed until the investigation closed.

Colombians who leave the front face a second danger. On November 10, 2025, a court that Russia administers in Donetsk sentenced José Aarón Medina Aranda and Alexander Ante to 13 years each for fighting alongside Ukraine’s armed forces. The two had flown to Caracas on their way home to Popayán. Venezuela handed them to Russia instead.

The supply side explains what the demand side cannot. Colombia has fought drug cartels and guerrilla armies for more than 60 years, and that war produced the deepest pool of combat hardened veterans in the hemisphere. The Associated Press put annual retirements from Colombia’s armed forces at more than 10,000, a figure the Defense Ministry has given as roughly 10,600. Most leave in their late 30s or early 40s after 15 to 20 years fighting the FARC, the ELN, and the cartels, and Colombian law pushes most soldiers and noncommissioned officers out by 45.

Citing the Colombian daily La Patria, McFee reports that rank and file soldiers earn close to $400 a month on active duty, and that retirement often halves whatever they were making. Ukraine pays soldiers in combat operations from $3,000 to $5,000 a month, offers a potential $25,000 signing bonus, and promises families a $350,000 death benefit. At a December 2025 forum in Bogotá on the veteran exodus, convened by the Corioli Institute that McFee founded and directs, one participant described Ukraine as “the first real door that opens,” for economically troubled veterans.

That door has been swinging for decades. Plan Colombia poured American money and training into building one of the Western hemisphere’s largest professional militaries, and the graduates kept arriving faster than the domestic economy could absorb them. Erik Prince got there early. Blackwater affiliates had been placing retired Colombian soldiers in Iraq since 2004, and by 2010 Prince was building something larger. Late that November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men landed in Abu Dhabi, where an Emirati intelligence officer waved them through customs and an unmarked bus carried them 20 miles into the desert. They had entered the country posing as construction workers.

The New York Times reported that they were the first recruits for a battalion of 800 foreign troops Prince was assembling for the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, financed with $529 million from the Emirates. In 2015 the same two reporters found that Emirati money had sent roughly 450 Latin American fighters, hundreds of them Colombian, to fight the Houthis in Yemen. At around 1 a.m. on July 7, 2021, a team of just over two dozen mercenaries, most of them former Colombian soldiers, stormed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s home above Port-au-Prince and shot him dead. A Miami jury convicted four more plotters in May 2026. The 18 Colombians arrested in Haiti are still jailed without trial, and no one has established who ordered the hit.

The most recent destination is also the darkest. In May 2026 Human Rights Watch published an 83-page report by Joey Shea and Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, From Bogotá to El Fasher, documenting how the Abu Dhabi firm Global Security Services Group appears to have hired hundreds of Colombian contractors and routed them through Emirati military facilities to fight alongside the Rapid Support Forces. Investigators geolocated video of Spanish speaking contractors fighting in El Fasher, and six residents of the city said they saw men they believed were Colombian standing armed at the sites of the October 2025 mass killings and rapes that the UN fact finding mission called consistent with genocide.

One contractor told Human Rights Watch he trained RSF recruits near Nyala and that many of them were young children. The Treasury Department had already sanctioned the Colombian recruiter A4SI on December 9, 2025, finding that the firm ran campaigns through its website, group chats and town halls to fill slots for drone operators, snipers and translators.

UN experts have put only a rough number on the whole enterprise. After visiting Colombia from March 16 to 27, 2026, the Working Group on the use of mercenaries reported that more than 10,000 Colombians have been “recruited into armed conflicts worldwide, both through legal and irregular means,” many of them former soldiers, police and veterans, and many offered between $2,000 and $6,000 a month. Its preliminary findings are blunter about the limits of that count.

Working Group member Joana de Deus Pereira told reporters in Bogotá that proliferating conflicts had raised demand and Colombians were filling it, naming the escalation in the Middle East, the war in Sudan, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Chairperson Michelle Small said foreign buyers seek out former Colombian personnel, and warned that deceptive contracts, where firms pay far less than advertised or write outright fake ones, can amount to labor exploitation and human trafficking.

Petro met the crisis with a statute, though its reach remains uncertain. The House approved the bill in December 2025 by 94 to 17, and Petro signed Law 2569 on March 17, 2026, adopting the 1989 convention against mercenary recruitment. Colombia has not actually ratified it yet. The Constitutional Court must review the law first, which is why the UN experts urged Bogotá to hurry. Whether it bites is another question.

The next administration inherited the law and a very different set of priorities. De la Espriella took office in August promising to rebuild security ties with Washington, which largely frayed under his predecessor. He will also look to stay in Washington’s good graces by towing a pro-Zionist line.

Part of this rapprochement will likely also involve Colombia reactivating its mercenary pipelines in the Russo-Ukrainian theater, as Washington increasingly leans on proxy forces and covert operations in what is beginning to look like a pyrrhic victory for Russian forces.

The brief, defiant interlude of the Petro administration has been decisively shut down, and Colombia has been reset to its default setting as a loyal vassal state of the Judeo-American empire. Under Abelardo de la Espriella, Bogotá will remain the premier supplier of disposable infantry for Washington’s global destabilization schemes from Kiev to the Middle East.

Ultimately, Bogotá’s most lethal and dependable global export is neither coffee nor cocaine, but the expendable blood of veterans marching straight from one meat grinder into the next.

September 15, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism, War Crimes | Colombia, Ukraine | Comments Off on The Andean Shadow Army