Globalized Cartel-Military Complex: How Neoliberal Violence and Arms Trade Fuel Hybrid Wars Beyond Borders
Original framing: “Mexican and Colombian cartel mercenaries filmed fighting in Ukraine” — Al Jazeera
The involvement of Latin American cartels in Ukraine echoes historical patterns of mercenary warfare, from the Condottieri of Renaissance Italy to the African mercenaries in Cold War conflicts. In Latin America, the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua and the paramilitaries in Colombia were similarly recruited and trained by Western powers, only to later become criminalized as cartels. This history shows how state-sponsored violence often metastasizes into privatized forms, a cycle now repeating in Ukraine with cartel actors.
The involvement of Mexican and Colombian cartel members in Ukraine’s war is not an anomaly but the logical outcome of a globalized system where state failure, economic desperation, and militarized capitalism converge.
The historical legacy of U.S. interventionism in Latin America—from the drug war to neoliberal structural adjustment—has directly created the conditions for cartel expansion, while the global arms trade and private military sector have provided the tools for their militarization. Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the region have long warned about the dangers of this path, offering alternatives rooted in communal governance and resistance to extraction. Yet, mainstream narratives continue to treat cartels as isolated criminal threats rather than symptoms of a broader crisis of sovereignty. The trickster figure of Coyote forces us to confront the absurdity of a system that criminalizes cartels while simultaneously enabling their militarization as proxies in hybrid wars. To break this cycle, solutions must address the root causes—economic justice, arms trade regulation, and community-led peacebuilding—while centering the voices of those most affected by this violence.