Some 800 retired special-forces veterans of the Colombian army will be fighting<\/u> in Yemen<\/u><\/a> soon as mercenary soldiers. It\u2019s no surprise: Colombia is a star contributor to the U. S. project of orchestrating proxy warriors to enforce its global plan. The mercenaries represent only a small part of the assistance Colombia provides overall. The big story is Colombia\u2019s program of using military and police officers to instruct soldiers, police, and intelligence personnel in dozens of countries within the U. S. orbit.<\/p>\n The Colombian mercenaries will be joining military forces of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) engaged in Yemen as part of a Saudi-led coalition now fighting to restore Sunni rule to that distraught nation. They will receive a pension and also UAE citizenship, along with family members. If they die in combat, their children will go to university free.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Arrangements were already in place. On behalf of his military contracting firm Xe Services, Erik Prince signed a $539 million contract in 2011 with UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to supply fighters for wars throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. The New York Times indicated Colombian mercenaries were involved and suggested that the U. S. government was endorsing Prince\u2019s venture<\/u><\/a>.<\/u> The United States had concerns about political changes following the \u201cArab Spring\u201d and about gains for Iran. Prince\u2019s earlier company, Blackwater, \u201chas a long history of working with Colombians<\/u><\/a>,\u201d analyst Jeremy Scahill pointed out.<\/p>\n Colombians fighting in Yemen will be serving U.S. strategic purposes. Saudi Arabia entered Yemen\u2019s civil war in March 2015 at the head of a coalition of four Arabian Gulf states including the UAE. The United States is contributing to a naval blockade and provides military advisers and drone attacks. The coalition\u2019s objective is to thwart the return to power of <\/strong>Yemen\u2019s Houthi movement of Iran-backed Shiites. The Saudis have enjoyed $90 billion in U. S. <\/strong>military assistance since 2010<\/u><\/a>.<\/u><\/p>\n Yemen claims natural gas reserves of more than 478.5 billion cubic meters and oil reserves of three billion barrels. Ships carrying 3.8 million barrels<\/u><\/a> of oil daily through the narrow Strait of Hormuz are vulnerable to Yemeni \u2013 sited weapons.<\/p>\n Yet Colombian mercenaries fighting a war in Yemen on the U. S. side are contributing far less to U. S. purposes than does direct Colombian government assistance in the form of ongoing instruction provided to the soldiers and police of U. S. allies. Colombia\u2019s lead role recalls the nation\u2019s deployment of 5,100 soldiers to the Korean War; no other Latin American sent troops.<\/p>\n President Obama in April 2012 praised Colombia for sharing its \u201cexpertise in security<\/u><\/a>.\u201d In recent years Colombian military and police trainers have instructed counterparts in Latin American and Caribbean nations, and also in Africa and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n One report<\/u><\/a> refers to teaching provided for 9,983 foreign security forces between 2010 and 2012; another<\/u><\/a>, to preparation of 3,000 trainees from 2005 to 2012. The U. S. government provided Colombia with funding in 2014 for preparing 6,526 police and soldiers<\/u><\/a> in 10 Latin American countries. Since 2009<\/u><\/a> Colombia has supposedly trained 30,000 security personnel in 60 countries.<\/p>\n That relatively large number may result from the category of \u201cpolice\u201d having been expanded to include drug surveillance, border security, and prison work. A Colombian official\u2019s statement<\/u><\/a> in 2013 that \u201c4,000 Panamanian police agents alone have already been trained in Colombia\u201d is consistent with that idea. So too is a report that military and police training was provided over four recent years to \u201cmore than 10,310 members<\/u><\/a>\u201d<\/u> of Mexico\u2019s \u201csecurity forces.\u201d<\/p>\n Colombia pays<\/u><\/a> the salaries of military and police teachers. The U. S. government provides equipment and supplies and pays for the travel, housing, and feeding of instructors and students. The U. S. State Department supervises student selection. Many Colombian instructors qualify through past attendance at the U. S. Army\u2019s School of the Americas, renamed as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. They\u2019ve maintained combat skills through counter-insurgency war at home. Instruction takes place inside Colombia and abroad.<\/p>\n Just as U. S. military aid to Colombia is often misidentified as \u201cdrug war\u201d assistance rather than as support for the counter-insurgency war, references to teaching about how to fight drug traffickers \u2013 pervasive in the material surveyed here \u2013 may be similarly inaccurate.<\/p>\n Colombian military officials hope the instruction program will help preserve<\/u><\/a> governmental support if war with guerrillas should end and security forces are reduced; Colombia presently has 444,520 <\/u>\u201cfrontline<\/a> personnel.\u201d And the government sells its own military equipment<\/u><\/a> for use within the instruction program.<\/p>\n For the U. S. government to pay the cost of housing, feeding, and equipping foreign trainees is less onerous than paying for \u201ca U. S. \u201csquadron of instructors<\/u><\/a>\u201d abroad. U. S. Assistant Secretary William R. Brownfield regards help from the Colombians as payback: \u201cIt\u2019s a dividend<\/u><\/a> we get for investing over $9 billion in support for Plan Colombia.\u201d<\/p>\n Importantly, there is the notion that if trainees violate human rights, the U. S. government is blameless inasmuch as the military and police instructors are Colombian. The dismal human rights record of police, soldiers, and paramilitaries in U. S. client states in Latin America provides a rationale for expecting trouble.<\/p>\n Testifying before Congress, U. S. Southern Command head General John Allen spoke of <\/u><\/a>\u201cThe beauty of having a Colombia \u2013 they\u2019re such good partners, \u2026 When we ask them to go somewhere else and train the Mexicans, the Hondurans, the Guatemalans, the Panamanians, they will do it almost without asking, [And it\u2019s] important for <\/strong>them<\/em> to go, because I\u2019m\u2013at least on the military side\u2013restricted from working with some of these countries because of limitations that are, that are really based on past sins<\/strong>. And I\u2019ll let it go at that.\u201d<\/p>\n The Leahy Law of 1997 prohibits<\/u><\/a> the \u201cfurnishing of [military] assistance \u2026 to any foreign security force unit where there is credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet reliance on Colombian intermediaries still poses problems. After all, the program\u2019s instructors, or the military and police units they belong to, may have nefarious associations. According to NACLA.org<\/u><\/a>, \u201cThere is a direct correlation between the more than $5 billion in military assistance the United States has given Colombia since 1999 and a dramatic spike of extrajudicial killings in the country.\u201d The NACLA communication cited a 2010 report of condemnation<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n Colombia\u2019s government remains the good and faithful servant of a United States pursuing a mission of global dominance. Acquiescence stems from decades of lavish U. S. military aid, from common purpose in destroying Marxist-oriented guerrillas, and from wealth flowing to Colombia\u2019s elite from ties with U. S. \u2013 based trans-national corporations.<\/p>\n The relationship qualifies for a name taken from another context. Referring to Britain\u2019s Ulster colony in Ireland, a British governor of Palestine<\/u><\/a> in the 1920s thanked the Zionist movement for building \u201ca loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potential hostile Arabism.\u201d So why not speak now of a Colombian Ulster? Colombia is a safe and malleable U. S. haven in a hazardous Latin American sea.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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