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Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá and Tom Phillips report:
When Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín flew to the tourist crowded airport of Punta Cana early last month on Avianca flight 252, immigration officials are unlikely to take a second look at the 41 year old Colombian. Visitors from all over the world flock to this Dominican resort town every week in search of Caribbean sun, sea and sand.
Grosso appears to have had quite different plans, however: to sneak across the border into neighboring Haiti and help assassinate that country’s president.
“Colombian mercenaries: trained, cheap and available”, one reads in a big title in Colombia’s largest newspaper, El Tiempo, on Friday after the the former special forces fighter has been identified as one of 28 suspected killers of Jovenel Moïse.
The presence of so many foreigners among the Haitian leader’s alleged murderers shocked many, especially in Haiti itself. But Colombian guns have been popping up in war zones around the world, including Yemen, Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan, for years now.
Many have already been trained by American soldiers and, after spending years fighting insurgent groups or drug traffickers in Colombia, continue to find work with private military contractors based in the United States.
“After so many years of war, Colombia has only a surplus of people trained in deadly tactics,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola), a group reflection. “Many of them have been hired by private companies, often in the Middle East, where they make a lot more money than in the Colombian armed forces. Others ended up being mercenaries for drug traffickers and landowners, as paramilitaries. And now, for whoever planned this operation, in Haiti.
The suspects of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise are sitting on the ground handcuffed after their arrest, at the general direction of the police in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.Photo: Jean Marc Hervé Abélard / AP
Two days after Moïse was shot dead at his residence in Port-au-Prince, the identity of the masterminds of the crime remains an enigma and the subject of savage speculation in the streets of the capital. But on Friday, Colombian authorities named 13 of the suspected soldiers of fortune, according to Haitian security officials, involved. Colombian police director General Jorge Luis Vargas Valencia told reporters that four companies had been involved in “recruiting” the murder suspects but had not identified them as their names were still being verified.
Eleven of the men reportedly flew to the Dominican resort town of Punta Cana from the Colombian capital Bogotá on the afternoon of June 4. El Tiempo named them such as: Víctor Alberto Pineda, Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín, Jhon Jairo Ramírez, Jhon Jairo Suárez, Germán Alejandro Rivera García, Maiger Franco Castañeda, Ángel Mario Yarce Sierra, Carlos Giovanny Guerrero, Francisco Eladio Uribe Ochoa, Mauricio Japizi Romero and Alejandro Rivera García. Uribe is said to be under investigation in Colombia for his role in the enforced disappearance and murder of civilians, who were then presented as guerrillas to inflate combat killings and receive bounties.
Two other former members of the Colombian army – Alejandro Rivera García and Duberney Capador Giraldo – reportedly arrived in the region about a month earlier, flying to the Dominican Republic via Panama before catching a flight to the Haitian capital on May 10. . Capador, 40, was reportedly among those killed by Haitian security forces as they chased the president’s assassins this week, while Rivera was among those arrested.
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