Mercenary group helping quell Haiti gangs, Erik Prince says
A pedestrian walks near the Bank of the Republic of Haiti, right, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 21, 2019.Associated Press / Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery, file
Prince, a Hillsdale College graduate and the founder of mercenary security business Vectus Global, said Tuesday that some of his employees were successfully fighting gangs in Haiti. They were supporting a task force of Haitian national police, he said. The former U.S. Navy SEAL shared a video clip from CNN depicting a gang leader asking Prince’s mercenaries to cease operations. In addition to boots-on-the-ground support, Prince’s Vectus Air Defense Systems is known to carry out drone strikes.
Haiti has been mostly controlled by gangs since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The police task force and its partners, including Prince’s group, have focused on fighting gangs in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Violence has continued across the country—for instance, a farming community’s church was burned in August, and dozens were reported dead. A United Nations-backed, multinational gang suppression force has deployed to Haiti and reported some success. But after months of operations, the UN said Sept. 29 that the force hadn’t yet reached its target size of 5,500 troops.
Prince said he recently saw evidence of better security conditions on a trip to Port-au-Prince. Combined security forces halted gangs’ advance in the capital and made progress in pushing them back, he added. Some markets reopened, children were once again walking to school in uniform, and police were patrolling the streets, he claimed.
However, the latest UN report on violence in Haiti noted that security forces sometimes killed bystanders while targeting gangs, especially during operations using explosive drones. At least 95 people not associated with gangs were killed from April to June, and the drones killed or hurt six children, according to the UN report. The report also said that while security forces curbed gang activity in some areas of the capital, violence worsened in other neighborhoods as rival gangs clashed.
Dig deeper: From the WORLD archives, read a feature profile of Erik Prince and his evangelical Christian roots in the Midwest.
After multiple sources previously told the Guardian that Erik Prince – Maga ally and founder of the now defunct mercenary company Blackwater – was looking to work with Ukraine’s invaluable drone sector, recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents confirm he now is.
Swarmer, which bills itself as a battle-tested Ukrainian startup specializing in autonomous drone software, filed for an initial public offering and has recruited Prince to help sell the company as non-executive chair.
“Swarmer is a software-first defense technology company focused on collaborative autonomy and intelligent swarming, originating from the cauldron of modern combat in Ukraine,” said Prince in a letter to prospective stockholders in the filing, released earlier this month.
“Since April 2024, Swarmer’s platform has been deployed in Ukraine with more than 100,000 real-world missions in active combat environments, informing the software and machine-learning models that feed into it.”
Defense industry hawks have eyed the battlefield intelligence the Ukrainian military has accrued in over four years of combat with Russia. The war has caused close to 2m casualties, but global military elites, like Prince, are also seeing glimpses of what a future war between world powers might look like and what products the US or its geopolitical rival China will need to buy.
On its website, Swarmer lauds endorsements from the newly installed Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is aggressively lobbying the US and other Nato allies to buy into his country’s weapons industry. Swarmer products, powered by artificial intelligence, are on the cutting edge of the future of war, with software enabling pilots to control drone swarms.
Swarmer mentions the potential profits in drone warfare in the same filing, noting to investors that “defense forces, including the US Department of Defense [and] Nato allies”, see “autonomous drone operations” as “requiring immediate investment”.
In a July announcement on the grounds of the Pentagon, the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, declared that the US was “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance” in a memorandum calling for the mass production, purchase and adoption of all unmanned vehicle platforms.
“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” he said.
“Erik is trying to network with companies here, for Congo,” said an executive at a multinational defense contractor with business in Ukraine. “He poached some operators who served here too.”
Through a spokesperson, Prince declined to comment on his work in Ukraine and about recruiting drone operators from there to serve in the DRC. Swarmer did not respond to a request for comment regarding its relationship with Prince.
In the fall, Swarmer, which advertises several “mission templates” for drones ranging from surveillance to something it calls a “Killbox”, secured millions in investment.
Prince and a legion of Silicon Valley executives, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have descended on Kyiv in recent years looking to score government contracts and access to both the software powering combat drones and the Ukrainian operators pioneering their flight.
But even as a frontman, Prince comes to Swarmer as a highly controversial figure who is also a known associate of Donald Trump’s longtime adviser Steve Bannon. Blackwater – Prince’s former company that made millions in contracts with the Pentagon and the CIA – has become synonymous with the corruption and failures of the war in Iraq. A 2007 massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of Prince’s mercenaries led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and the company changing its name.
Prince eventually resigned as the CEO in 2009, but hung around the defense contracting world and pursued ventures in China, the United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, South Sudan and Ukraine, where in 2020 he pitched Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a multibillion-dollar private army to help settle what was a frozen war in the eastern Donbas region.
In September, multiple sources described to the Guardian how Prince was making several trips to Kyiv, courting Ukrainian drone makers who might be eager to sell him into their business – Swarmer fitting the profile of the type of company with which he was looking to do business.
“I guess he finally found the company to invest in, in Ukraine,” said a former American special forces soldier with experience in Ukraine and knowledge of the defense companies operating there.
Swarmer has featured in western media since its founding in 2023, along with several other Ukrainian tech companies emerging from the flurry of Pentagon and Nato weapons transfers to Ukraine and the rush to continue resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion by any means necessary.
Mostly outgunned against the Kremlin’s vast arsenal and coffers, Ukraine has turned to drones and homegrown solutions as asymmetric equalizers. Recent remarks by Zelenskyy puts Swarmer among hundreds of other Ukrainian drone companies that are now active in the country.
“As of today, we have 450 companies producing drones, 40 to 50 of which are top-tier,” said Zelenskyy in a recent speech. “Everyone wants to invest, so 2026 will be a year of investment in our technologies, primarily in drones.”
Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning
Since 2011, the UAE has regularly resorted to using mercenaries to wage its wars in Libya and Yemen. Its small population of 2.7 million leaves it unable to recruit enough troops. It is also risk averse in deploying them abroad where casualties for an unsupported cause are unacceptable to the population. Hence, the oil-rich state started hiring contract soldiers from abroad to fight for it in Yemen against the Houthi rebels.
This leads to a rather strange situation. Colombians hired by an Abu Dhabi based company employed by the UAE are fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The involvement of Erik Prince, the controversial ex-founder of Blackwater, should hardly come as a surprise at this point. Especially given his role as a mercenary captain for the UAE. These mercenaries have manifested in multiple different organisations and groups with their own operating procedures/character. (Source)
The most notable are as follows:
Reflex Response Security Consultants (Headed by Erik Prince and filled with ex-Colombian special forces)
Spear Operations Group (Delaware-based company led by a Hungarian-Israeli Abraham Golon, specialised in targeted assassinations)
Black Shield Security (Involved in a forced conscription scandal tricking Sudanese migrants with misleading jobs)
Erik Prince is an American businessman best recognized as the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater, which became a symbol of US abuses during the war in Iraq. Prince, who now heads up a private equity firm, quietly advised the Trump transition team on intelligence and security issues.
On April 3, 2017, The Washington Post reported Prince had traveled to the Seychelles islands around January 11th to attend a secret meeting with a Russian close to Vladimir Putin set up by the United Arab Emirates. The alleged purpose of the meeting was to establish unofficial backchannel communications between Moscow and the incoming Trump administration. While Prince had no formal role on the Trump transition team, he was a high-dollar campaign donor whose sister, Betsy DeVos, now serves as Trump’s Secretary of Education. Both former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and a spokesman for Prince refuted the allegations by saying Prince had “no role” on the Trump transition team.
El Salvador deploys special forces to Haiti to help find 4 missing soldiers who came under attack
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele speaks at the National Palace as he hosts a meeting with U.S. congresspeople in San Salvador, El Salvador, Jan. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez, File)License this photo
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — El Salvador deployed 100 special forces soldiers to Haiti on Thursday to help rescue four missing soldiers from the Central American country who recently came under attack by gangs, two officials told The Associated Press.
The special forces arrived a day after Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele announced a military operation to rescue the four aviation technicians and threatened a more forceful response if they’re not released alive and unharmed.
An official with El Salvador’s government not authorized to speak on the matter said an additional 100 soldiers were going to be deployed to Haiti on Thursday night. The official said Salvadorean authorities were operating under the assumption that the four missing Salvadoreans are still alive.
Prince, dueño de la polémica empresa militar Blackwater, visitó el CECOT.
COMPARTIR:
El presidente Nayib Bukele junto al empresario y exmilitar Erik Dean Prince. /Captura del vídeo de CAPRES
El presidente de El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, celebró un encuentro con el empresario y exmilitar estadounidense, Erik Dean Prince.
En un vídeo compartido en redes sociales, de solo 47 segundos, Prince inicia elogiando a Bukele su discurso en la Conferencia de Acción Política Conservadora 2024 (CPAC), en Maryland, una reunión de la derecha conservadora estadounidense realizada en febrero de 2024.
Price visitó el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), ubicado en Tecoluca, San Vicente, catalogado como “impresionante”. “No estoy sorprendido, pero sí me indigna que el Departamento de Estado de EE.UU. UU. todavía clasifique a El Salvador como un país peligroso, como que fuera zona de guerra”, añadió.
A esto, Bukele responde que “esperamos cambiar eso porque no es sostenible”. “Nos deberían clasificar como nivel uno, no sucederá, pero al menos en nivel dos sería más sostenible”, sostuvo el mandatario.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
