The Global Reach of Colombia’s Private Security Firms
In response to violent drug gangs, Colombians have taken to employing private security who are trained to kill and outnumber the police and the army. But their close ties to the far right and the cartels means they often only make Colombians more unsafe.
Private security company Shatter Seguridad in Columbia, 2025. (Kurt Hollander / Jacobin)
There are nearly half a million private citizens in Colombia — more than all the country’s soldiers and police officers combined — who legally carry weapons and are licensed to kill. The armed men and women who guard the entrance to gated condominiums and luxury malls, who drop the children of the wealthy and powerful off at expensive private schools, and who drive or ride shotgun on the armored vehicles that transport money and valuables are all employees of private security firms.
During the administration of ex-president Iván Duque, private security companies expanded greatly, especially during the COVID pandemic. The government added several more of its institutions, including education, media, sports, and culture as clients and opened the possibility for the privatization of prisons with security companies contracted to run them. The private security industry now represents more than 1 percent of the country’s GDP. In addition, Duque made establishing private security companies easier by reducing the number of requirements and inspections, granting licenses that are nearly impossible to revoke because they only need to be renewed once every ten years.
In the 1990s, at the height of the Colombian drug cartels’ influence, oficinas de cobro (collection offices), run mostly by paramilitary leaders or retired police and military officers, offered security to those who most needed it. Narcos and other criminals were the main beneficiaries of this arrangement in which oficinas transported profits, product, and weapons across the country. They also supplied bodyguards to their high-ranking workers and paid sicarios (hired assassins) to kill off the competition and to execute anyone within their own organization who skimmed off the top or broke the rules.
The Expansion of Private Security
When the drug cartels disbanded and new drug and criminal organizations splintered off, oficinas often offered their services to rival, warring gangs at the same time, thus capitalizing on the high-level of insecurity and violence emerging within the major cities. Since the establishment of oficinas, half of all murders in Colombia have been committed by sicarios. These days, sicarios can still be hired to settle business differences, but they also serve to resolve personal vendettas or to get revenge against cheating spouses. Being that the price of a hired killer can be as low as US $100, assassinations in Colombia are no longer the exclusive tools of high-ranking narcos and crime bosses. They have been democratized.
Private security companies have flourished thanks to the rise of sicarios and the homicides they have perpetuated. There are now as many as eight thousand different private security companies in the country. Many paramilitary leaders and managers of oficinas have established their own legal, private security companies or became associates of already existing firms. This has allowed them to expand their clientele to include legal businesses and individuals.
The most-coveted client of Colombian private security companies is the government, especially the National Protection Unit (UNP). The UNP is a huge institution established at the urging of the international community. It provides protection to government functionaries, journalists, individuals, and communities at risk of being murdered by any of the many guerrilla groups or criminal organizations that operate in all parts of the country.
The government not only offers very profitable contracts to private security companies, it also gives these private companies special treatment. This includes paying for the benefits that retired police and military receive if they are hired by these companies.
As UNP’s budget increased exponentially over the past decade, it has been accused of ever more abuses. High-ranking members of the UNP, including an ex-director, have been imprisoned for their connections to narcos and criminal organizations. The UNP has also been accused of hiring out its bodyguards for its witness protection services to known criminals under the pretext that they are at risk of being assassinated.
The UNP’s new director, Augusto Rodríguez, handpicked by President Gustavo Petro to separate the institution from criminal influence, was almost killed in an assassination attempt just before taking office. Everywhere he goes he is accompanied by bodyguards, even (or especially) in the institution he directs. This is made less surprising by the fact that journalists have recently tied Rodríguez to a well-known criminal figure, Papa Pitufo — one of the many entanglements between the Colombian state and criminal organizations.
Journalists have also uncovered evidence of cartels using the UNP’s armored vehicles, whose purpose is to protect public servants, journalists, and community leaders who have received death threats, transporting drugs. One hundred fifty kilos of cocaine was recently found stashed in one of these vehicles, which are not immune from searches by police and military personal without a judge-issued warrants.
Of the ten thousand bodyguards that the UNP employs, the institution only hires 10 percent directly. The rest come from private security companies. Most people employed by the security and surveillance industry in Colombia are ex-military or recruited from the police, but many are also demobilized paramilitaries or even guerrillas. Private security companies, and the people they hire, are not officially vetted for ties to criminal organizations and thus many employees work both sides of the law (several sicarios were recently caught in flagrante with credentials from a private security company).
Increased Control
When the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), Colombia’s secret police, responsible for the selective assassinations of hundreds of civilians, was caught wiretapping and selling sensitive information to criminal organizations and paramilitary units, they were dismantled by the government. Over eight hundred of these secret police, however, were eventually incorporated into UNP, either directly or through private security companies.
It is calculated that more than a third of the bodyguards contracted by UNP are hired from one or more of the seven private security companies (including Guardianes, the largest such company in Colombia) owned by the so-called czar of security, Jorge Arturo Moreno. Convicted of unfair business practices, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison, Moreno lives in Miami as a fugitive of the law. Nonetheless, Moreno’s private security companies continue to receive juicy contracts from the UNP.
As private security companies grow in number and power, they take over increasingly more control. Private security companies were recently granted access to all closed-circuit TV channels in condominiums in Colombia and are now able to control the processing of citizens’ data for their own use. These companies also have access to risk evaluation for administrative processes, labor recruitment and evaluation, risk and danger predictions in hiring processes, data analysis, facial recognition and predictive intelligence as well. Many security companies now use robotics, artificial intelligence, drones, and software to offer alternative solutions.
Besides handling the security of urban dwellings and malls, government officials have granted large conglomerates licenses to operate their own private armies in Colombia and supplied them with weapons. Business groups, especially mining companies, agro-industries, and cattle ranchers, also contract paramilitary groups in order to protect themselves from leftist guerrillas and criminal organizations.
Under the guise of protecting itself from guerrilla attacks on its oil pipes, Ecopetrol, the huge government-owned oil and petrochemical industry, hired the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the largest paramilitary criminal organization in Colombia at that time, to protect their business interests, which included killing off union and community leaders who protested the company’s abuses.
US corporations have long hired paramilitary organizations to handle their security and to do their dirty work. Chiquita Brands International, the company that imports most of the bananas to the United States from Colombia, gave almost two million dollars to the AUC from 1997 to 2004, and sent them 3,400 AK-47 rifles and four million rounds of ammunition, even though the AUC were listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization since 2001.
The coal mining giants Drummond Company and Glencore International have also been accused of hiring AUC paramilitary forces from the 1990s throughout the 2010s to act as a private security force for their mining operations in Colombia (several local union leaders and members were assassinated during this time).
In 2001, a Miami court accused Coca-Cola of having “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained, or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.” The company has denied these charges.
Foreign Presence
Colombia has Latin America’s largest military force, battle-trained over decades of civil war. When they retire or are demobilized, elite military or paramilitary soldiers often either find employment in private security companies or in the global marketplace as mercenaries. Former Colombian elite soldiers are sought out in the international private security market for their experience in armed conflict, US (anti-Communist) training, and because they are much cheaper than their US or European counterparts.
In order to hire themselves out to private security companies, especially for overseas activity, highly trained Colombian military personnel retire as soon as they can, or even defect early from the army. As a result, the private security industry is constantly siphoning off qualified personnel from government military forces, leaving them understaffed and forced to constantly train new personnel. As its soldiers began retiring earlier, the Colombian military modified its contract so that soldiers had to fulfill a minimum period of service before heading over to the private sector.
From 2000 until 2017, as part of Plan Colombia, designed to fight leftist guerrilla groups, the US government sent more than $10 billion in aid to Colombia, with more than 70 percent going directly to the country’s military and police. Much of this money, however, was rerouted back to American private military contractors, including Blackwater, Defense Systems Limited, Military Professional Resources Inc., DynCorp, and Global CST, who charged exorbitant amounts of money to train or equip Colombian special units and paramilitaries.
With their ties to the Pentagon and State Department, private military contractors often recruit retired elite Colombian military officers or paramilitaries. In 2009, Blackwater (currently called Academi), one of the largest private military contractors in the world, founded the first mercenary recruiting company in Colombia. Since then, Colombian mercenaries have been sent by private military contractors to fight dirty wars around the globe.
In 2006, thirty-five Colombian military veterans were hired to defend US army bases in Iraq, and hundreds of Colombian mercenaries fought in Afghanistan in 2010. In 2011, Colombian mercenaries were shipped off to Abu Dhabi, ostensibly to provide security to Emirate oil assets, but instead they served as part of the Saudi-led coalition of mercenaries deployed in Yemen. The company Global Security Services Group has also been sending Colombian mercenaries to Yemen to escort European and US ships crossing the Gulf of Aden, frequently attacked by pirates.
Hundreds of Colombian mercenaries are currently fighting Russian troops in Ukraine. The Russian ambassador to Colombia, recognizing the damage caused by these units, accused the Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside the Ukrainians of “knowing nothing more than how to carry out terrorist attacks.” The Colombian government estimates that sixty-four of Colombian mercenaries have already been killed there and over 120 are missing in action.
Besides the international private military contractors and security companies, there are several private security firms in Colombia that hire mercenaries out worldwide. A4SI, a private military contractor founded in 2017 and run by retired Colombian military officers, has sent more than three hundred Colombian mercenaries have been sent to fight in the Sudan civil war. At least twenty-two have died there. Most of the men who military contractors send into battle believed they are going to be employed as private security guards. Colombian mercenaries are also being sent to fight for Mexican drug cartels, a specialty of theirs.
Colombian mercenaries have often been hired to carry out selective assassinations and to topple regimes. In 2004, Venezuelan authorities detained 153 Colombian paramilitaries accused of taking part in a plan to assassinate then president Hugo Chávez. The twenty-six Colombian mercenaries involved in the assassination of the president of Haiti, contracted by the Miami-based firm CTU Security (owned by the Venezuelan Antonio Intriago, currently serving prison time in the United States), were active reserves of the Colombian military and several had been trained by US military units such as the Green Berets.
The same private security contractors that send out mercenaries to assassinate foreign leaders are also actively supplying killers within Colombia. President Petro has survived several assassinations attempts. When he gives public speeches, Petro must be constantly surrounded by bodyguards who hold up thick shields equipped with small windows for him to be seen by the crowds. Recently, a plot to shoot two missiles at Petro’s presidential jet was uncovered. Although many opposition leaders mock his concerns as paranoia, several of the most important left-wing politicians have been assassinated in Colombia over the years.
Democratization of Services
Neither the United States nor Colombia have signed the UN’s International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries. Thus, when mercenaries are caught with their hands on smoking guns, the United States and their private contractors are able to deny any knowledge of their actions. Crimes and human rights violations committed by mercenaries are deemed the legal responsibility of the material perpetrators, that is, the soldiers of fortune themselves.
The UN has passed hundreds of resolutions in the last twenty years to curb the private industry of mercenaries, but without the support of the United States. With the profits it generates, the private security industry is likely to continue to grow.
When mercenaries return to Colombia after seeing combat abroad, they receive no medical attention for PTSD or other mental disorders before they find employment. Returning mercenaries are often hired out as enforcers or assassins to criminal organizations or paramilitary armies, but they can also easily find employment in any of the thousands of private security companies.
Just as the use of sicarios has been popularized and democratized in Colombia, anyone can now easily access the services of private security companies. One such business in the city of Cali, named Tu Escolta Ya (Your Own Bodyguard Now), makes hiring armed protection, with a motorcycle or armored car if so desired, as easy as calling an Uber.
However, without knowing the previous experience of the man or woman who is standing with their finger on the trigger of a hand gun or shotgun protecting private property, without fully knowing what ties there are between the owners and employees of private security companies and criminal organizations in Colombia, and without knowing just how much criminal organizations have penetrated into government institutions charged with the protection of people in vulnerable situations, the sense of insecurity within the country is even more real than the fear of crime and violence on city streets.