Mexican cartels are recruiting former Colombian soldiers

MEXICO CITY — Dangerous new hired guns have arrived on the battlefield of Mexico’s cartel wars: Colombian mercenaries.

Former combatants in Colombia’s long-standing internal conflict are increasingly being lured to Mexico by criminal groups to train hitmen, build bombs and fight bloody turf battles.

Eleven Colombians were arrested in Michoacán state last week in connection to a roadside bomb attack that killed eight members of Mexico’s National Guard. Colombia’s foreign ministry said all of the detained men had once been soldiers.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on X that a cartel known as Los Reyes had “hired the Colombian mercenaries to confront the Mexican state.”

The phenomenon highlights the growing intensity of Mexico’s cartel warfare as well as the expanding role of Colombian combatants in conflicts globally. Recruited via private companies and even via TikTok, Colombians have fought in Sudan, Yemen and Ukraine.

More than 300 Colombian fighters have died defending Ukraine from Russian attacks, Colombian officials say.

Haitian authorities allege 26 Colombian mercenaries participated in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. Colombians also were implicated in the 2023 killing of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

Many of the fighters are former military personnel with meager or no pensions and little training for any activity other than war.

“You have this pool of human resources that is poorly compensated and not utilized to their full potential,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia analyst with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit think tank. “They’re being swept up with these attractive offers, both by states, by defense companies and also by criminal groups.”

The soldiers are in demand because they have real-life experience battling narcos and guerrillas in their home country. Colombia’s army is the largest and most professional in Latin America, the recipient of billions dollars in aid from the United States.

Compared with American or European security contractors, Colombian fighters are cheap, Dickinson said: “They’re the ideal recruit.”

Many Colombians say they were tricked into working with the cartels.

Freddy, a 46-year-old who did not give his last name for fear of reprisals from a cartel, left the Colombian military at age 32 after more than a decade of intense combat fighting leftist guerrillas. He earned about $300 a month working for a private security firm in Colombia. When he heard about a supposed job with the French Foreign Legion offering $3,000 a month, he signed up, imaging a future guarding dignitaries or assisting in peacekeeping missions.

He thought he would be making a quick stopover in Mexico City when his contacts flew him there last year. But once he arrived, he and the nine other Colombians he had traveled with were driven to an isolated encampment in Jalisco state. Their phones and passports were confiscated, and they were told they were now part of a cartel.

Freddy said he was forced to participate in torture and killings. He said he would be killed if he did not oblige: “It’s either your life or the life of the person in front of you.”

Two other Colombian fighters recently active in Mexico described being lured there with the promise of good-paying jobs, according to video footage reviewed by The Times. Upon arrival, they claimed, they were ferried to cartel hot spots, handed guns and told to fight — and warned that their families would be harmed if they deserted.

“They deceived me,” said one man who said he was pledged $3,000 monthly as a security guard, but who instead was made to work for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel for roughly $300 a month.

He said he provided weapons training for about 100 cartel soldiers, many of whom were under 18 and there against their will. “We were practically slaves,” he said. “They tell you: ‘Go fight, and whoever dies, dies.’ They don’t care about human life.”

The other man, a former Colombian police officer, said he worked as a medic alongside other international mercenaries from Venezuela and Guatemala. He said he had seen several Colombians die on the battlefield.

Mexican authorities have known for years that cartels are employing foreign fighters.

A Mexican military intelligence report from 2021 said the head of an armed cell working under a cartel leader known as El Abuelo — The Grandfather — employed 26 Colombian “guerrilleros” to fight rivals from the Jalisco cartel.

The report, made public by the hacktivist group Guacamaya, said a drug lord from another group had hired 10 Colombians, paying them a weekly salary of around $600.

Derek Maltz, who stepped down last month as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Colombian fighters have an obvious appeal. In addition to providing combat-seasoned muscle, the mercenaries operate in the role of player-coach, helping young cartel foot soldiers learn the art of war, Maltz said.

“They are wanted for their expertise with the use of IEDs — these guys are experts in these types of techniques. They are training all the gangster sicarios,” Maltz said, using the Spanish term for hitmen.

The group headed by El Abuelo — whose real name is Juan José Farías Álvarez — is based in the western state of Michoacán, which sprawls from heart of Mexico to the Pacific Coast. His gang was included on the Trump administration’s list of cartels designated as foreign terrorist organizations earlier this year.

The rebranding enables U.S. law enforcement to pursue harsher penalties, and could open the door to drone strikes or other U.S. military action in Mexico, a possibility Trump has repeatedly floated.

Maltz said the U.S. has seen “significant progress” from Mexico on security under Trump, but argued the presence of foreign fighters trained in bomb-making strengthens the case for U.S. intervention.

“If it comes down to it, the U.S. government should use all tools in the toolbox to neutralize them,” Maltz said. “They need to feel pain like they’ve never felt before.”

The Jalisco cartel, one of the most powerful criminal groups in Mexico, was also included in Trump’s terror designation and is known to have strong Colombian connections.

The Mexican military recently released photos that indicate that some Colombians working for the cartels have fought in wars the world over.

One showed camouflage fatigues worn by a Colombian fighter festooned with patches that include the flag of Ukraine. Another showed a military-style beret with a logo referring to a Jalisco commander nicknamed “El Yogurt,” reputed to lead an armed cell that includes Colombians.

A narcocorrido ballad dedicated to El Yogurt boasts of his skills cooking methamphetamine (“In the kitchen, not a rival has been found…”) and notes that he “has a support team, his friends never leave him behind.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said last week that her country is in talks with Colombia about how to stop the flow of mercenaries.

“This is not the first time that people of this nationality have been arrested,” she said Thursday after the arrests of the 11 Colombians.

The issue is a sensitive one in Colombia, where the participation of Colombians in high-profile crimes has been the source of national shame. President Petro is pushing a bill that would require Colombia to sign on to a United Nations convention against the recruitment, financing and training of mercenaries.

Some veterans say it is discriminatory.

Ricardo Rodríguez, who worked as a security contractor in the United Arab Emirates after leaving the Colombian military, said in an interview that veterans should be able to take their skills elsewhere.

What former soldiers need, he said, is more support from the Colombian government.

“They’re stuck. They don’t have any hope of getting ahead,” he said, adding that the nation’s veterans will continue to look elsewhere for work “until the Colombian government gives them the opportunity to improve their lives.”

After eight months, Freddy escaped the cartel. Because he lacked identity documents, he traveled back to Colombia overland.

He’s back home now, but is out of work and in debt. He is plagued by nightmares about what he saw — and did — in Mexico. To toughen up young fighters, he said, cartel leaders forced them to eat barbecued human flesh.

Still, he is looking again for opportunities to go abroad as a mercenary. Europe — and the salary he could make there — still calls to him.

“I don’t have a career. I don’t have any other skills,” he said. “When you spend so many years at war, you don’t have a vision of doing anything else. I like guns. I like security. This is what I was trained for.”

Linthicum reported from Mexico City and Hamilton from San Francisco. Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell in Mexico City contributed to this report.