The recruitment of former military personnel, former paramilitaries, and members of other Colombian armed groups as mercenaries in the armies of different countries to fight foreign wars for money has been documented for years in different parts of the world. Now information continues gaining strength that former Colombian military personnel and paramilitaries are joining the ranks of drug trafficking cartels in Mexico.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) appears to have the largest number of Colombians. That is what the governor of the state of Michoacan, Alfredo Ramirez Bedolla, and the attorney general of that state, Carlos Torres Piña, have denounced, according to whom the foreign cells constitute an operation of more than 60 armed men serving the CJNG who have carried out attacks in at least 10 municipalities: Zamora, Jacona, Tangamandapio, Tangancicuaro, Chilchota, Charapan, Paracho, Cheran, Nahuatzen, and Los Reyes.
“What Mexico is witnessing today is not a simple dispute between local gangs, but a mutation of organized crime which, under the protection of inexhaustible checkbooks, has decided to professionalize extermination through the systematic recruitment of former Colombian military personnel and paramilitaries,” reported the portal zetatijuana.com, the official website of Semanario ZETA, a prominent Mexican journalistic institution based in Tijuana, Baja California, known for its investigative work, political reporting, and coverage of organized crime.
Cartels seek to increase the lethality of their armed branches
According to that outlet, the armed cells have turned “entire regions such as Guerrero and the State of Mexico into training grounds for a guerrilla war that the Mexican State seems incapable of containing.”
It also maintains that the war “has mutated its traditional forms into a tactical discipline imported from the South American jungles,” and the same is occurring in other western states of the country such as Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Zacatecas, where the CJNG has established its bases in its fight against other structured criminal organizations such as the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel (CSRL), Los Viagra, and the Sinaloa Cartel (CDS).
Attorney General Torres Piña, quoted by El Pais of Spain, has reported that the mercenaries move around in about eight or ten pickup trucks, which they use to commit crimes in the 10 municipalities mentioned and in the Purepecha Plateau. According to the Attorney General’s Office, these hitmen are also engaged in a fierce struggle against the Los Reyes Cartel and the Knights Templar Cartel, rivals of the CJNG in the area, with whom they dispute control of drug production and trafficking, as well as logging operations in the forests.
The phenomenon, which the portal zetatijuana.com describes as the “importation of military human capital,” is led predominantly by the CJNG and its allies, and responds to a strategic need to “increase the lethality of their armed branches, transforming rustic hitmen into operational cells with knowledge in counterinsurgency, intelligence, and urban combat.”
The situation, the same outlet says, “has ceased to be a barracks rumor and has become a reality documented by intelligence reports pointing to those federal entities [states] as the epicenters of this foreign training, where the presence of mercenaries has been the key behind the recent escalation of coordinated attacks against the Armed Forces.”
Explosives specialists sell themselves to the highest bidder
The seriousness of the situation can be measured in the precision of the new attacks, according to the portal. They are no longer bursts of gunfire into the air, but rather the surgical use of drones loaded with explosives and the strategic planting of land mines that have turned rural roads into deadly traps for both soldiers and civilians. In Colombia, illegal armed groups have made a qualitative leap and entered a new phase in which they prioritize attacks against the security forces through the use of drones.
From 2024 until last March, in the South American country, attacks with drones equipped with explosives reached 449 assaults, leaving a toll of 53 uniformed personnel dead and 435 injured. The affected forces were the Army, the Police, the National Navy, and the Aerospace Force. The structures that most frequently use those aircraft are the ELN, FARC Dissidents, and the Gulf Clan.
According to zetatijuana.com, Mexico’s federal government, through the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, “has had to recognize this recruitment pattern involving not only former rank-and-file soldiers, but explosives specialists whose experience was forged in decades of internal conflict in Colombia, now selling their knowledge to the highest bidder on Mexican territory.”
One year ago, Michoacan Security Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch reported that during an operation in the municipality of Los Reyes, 17 people were captured, twelve of whom were Colombian. They were linked to the killing of eight soldiers with an anti-personnel mine a few days earlier. He detailed that nine of them were former military personnel with extensive experience and three had military training in weapons use. They entered the country legally and are part of a pattern of transnational recruitment by drug trafficking organizations.