With the Haitian National Police confirming what WMR suspected in our July 8 report, that foreign mercenaries were behind the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on January 7, it is past time for the United States to clip the wings of American mercenary brigands like Erik Prince, Kent Kroeker, Jordan Goudreau, and others. The assassination team that was sent into Haiti to dispatch Moïse included two Haitian-Americans and 26 Colombians. Police Chief Leon Charles produced 17 captured members of the assassination team to the press on July 8 in Port-au-Prince, along with confiscated Colombian passports, weapons, and communications equipment, and other gear. The two Haitian-Americans arrested by police were identified as James Solages and Joseph Vincent. Four of the Colombians identified are Alejandro Giraldo Zapata, John Jairo Ramírez Gómez, Víctor Albeiro Piñera, and Mauricio Grosso Guarin. There have been a few reports that members of the assassination team were masquerading as agents for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which maintains a sizable presence in Colombia.
At least three of the mercenaries were killed by police and another eight remain at large. Eleven of the captured mercenaries were discovered inside the embassy of Taiwan, to which they escaped after killing Moïse and severely wounding his wife in their nearby residence. The Taiwanese foreign ministry issued the following statement: “The Haitian police launched an operation at about 4 pm [local time] and successfully arrested 11 suspected armed criminals. The process was smooth and the suspects did not resist.”
The mercenaries had ransacked Moïse’s bedroom and office and, after shooting him some 16 times, gouged out his left eye.
Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano confirmed that the Colombians arrested in Haiti were retired members of the Colombian armed forces. The presence of the Colombians bears the hallmarks of an operation carried out by Reflex Responses (R2) mercenaries working for Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince. R2, which is based in the United Arab Emirates, has hired former members of the Colombian military, many notorious for carrying out the most heinous of human rights abuses of Colombian peasants and indigenous tribal people. The gouging out of Moïse’s eye strongly suggests the handiwork of the Colombians. With the Haitian National Police confirming what WMR suspected in our July 8 report, that foreign mercenaries were behind the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on January 7, it is past time for the United States to clip the wings of American mercenary brigands like Erik Prince, Kent Kroeker, Jordan Goudreau, and others. The assassination team that was sent into Haiti to dispatch Moïse included two Haitian-Americans and 26 Colombians. Police Chief Leon Charles produced 17 captured members of the assassination team to the press on July 8 in Port-au-Prince, along with confiscated Colombian passports, weapons, and communications equipment, and other gear. The two Haitian-Americans arrested by police were identified as James Solages and Joseph Vincent. Four of the Colombians identified are Alejandro Giraldo Zapata, John Jairo Ramírez Gómez, Víctor Albeiro Piñera, and Mauricio Grosso Guarin. There have been a few reports that members of the assassination team were masquerading as agents for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which maintains a sizable presence in Colombia.
The Colombians, who have served UAE interests in fighting in civil wars in Yemen and Libya, are housed and trained at R2′s base inside the walled Zayed Military City outside of Abu Dhabi. The Colombians, as well as R2 mercenaries from Panama, El Salvador, Peru, and Chile, receive UAE residency and work permits, which erroneously describe them as “construction workers.” The Colombians and other Latin Americans are recruited by Thor Global Enterprises, a Prince front company headquartered in Tortola, British Virgin Islands. The main business of Thor Global Enterprises is “placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas.” Some of the Colombian mercenaries who previously served in the Colombian ESMAD riot squad and other counter-insurgency units were trained by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) personnel. Prince has close connections to Israel and the IDF and Mossad.
Prince abhors press coverage of his mercenary operations. He and his attorneys have forced The New York Times into publishing at least two retractions concerning the activities of R2 and its employment of foreign mercenaries. It is very likely that he will sic his attorneys on anyone linking the Colombians arrested in Haiti to those he has recruited for R2 in the UAE. Prince once forcefully shoved this editor aside as he fled a congressional hearing room after testifying about Blackwater, including the war crimes carried out by its employees in Iraq. Unlike The New York Times, I am not so easily intimidated by Prince — the shortest ex-Navy SEAL I have ever encountered — or his mouthpieces.
The Biden administration has an opportunity to sign and ratify the 2001 International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries. The international community has long striven to outlaw the use of mercenaries, beginning with the 1977 Organization of African Unity Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa. That same year, mercenaries were denied combatant status by an additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Mercenaries are nothing more than pirates, brigands, and guns-for-hire. They should receive no special protections or benefits under international or domestic law. Ideally, they should face the consequences that any pirate or brigand would encounter upon being captured, with life imprisonment being the best circumstance.
Cuba, which ratified the mercenary convention in 2007 and has faced more than its share of mercenary-led operations, takes a no-nonsense approach to international guns-for-hire. It defines a mercenary as “anyone who, in order to receive a wage or other form of material compensation, joins a military formation made up, in whole or in part, of individuals who are not citizens of the State in whose territory they plan to act” and “who collaborates in or carries out any other act for the direct or indirect purpose of achieving the aforementioned objective.” Cuba, therefore, sees no difference between mercenaries and so-called “private military contractors,” the disingenuous rubric under which such entities as Blackwater, R2, Silvercorp USA, DynCorp, CACI, Aegis, Academi (formerly Blackwater), Blue Hackle, and others operate.
Other countries that have been plagued by foreign mercenary operations also signed or ratified the mercenary treaty. They include Angola, Armenia, Barbados, Congo (Brazzaville), Costa Rica, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Honduras, Liberia, Libya, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Seychelles, Suriname, Syria, Togo, and Venezuela.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
