All the President's Mercenaries
- Pablo Díaz Gayoso
- Mar 10
- 4 min read
A story about the weight of words
Once upon a time there was a king of Norman origin who ruled England. This king appointed his childhood friend as chancellor to rule together and, at one point, even made him Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest rank within the Christian Church in the British Isles. With this coup, this king sought to secure control of political power and pull the strings of the religious, at a time when doing so meant everything. Undoubtedly, the king's plans did not meet with the approval of the newly appointed Archbishop. The religious incumbent strongly opposed the king's attempts to subject the clergy to the laws of Man. This conflict between childhood friends was far from escalating, but two sentences from the king were enough to change everything.
The king, in a moment of anger at seeing that his plans were not going as he would have liked at the beginning, pronounced in court: “Will there be no one capable of ridding me of this turbulent priest?” or, according to other more recent interpretations: “What wretched drones and traitors have I fed and bred in my house, who allow their lord to be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clergyman?” Whether these or other words were uttered by the king, what is certain is that four of those present interpreted that the king wished to assassinate the Archbishop and executed his “order.”
The assassination of Thomas Becket in 1170 went down in history as a martyr to the Catholic Church and his story serves to understand the influence that power can exert unintentionally. There are situations where the phrase: “your wish is my command” applies, and even in situations where those wishes are misinterpreted.
A story of the very devoted mercenary Prince
Donald Trump's return to the White House, as in his first term, is having an influence on members of the Court who interpret his wishes and are happy to execute them. One such member is Erik Prince, a traditional Republican donor and founder of the US mercenary group Blackwater (now Academi), part of the Constellis conglomerate. Prince already proposed to Trump in 2018 the possibility of fully privatizing the war in Afghanistan. He proposed taking over the operation for an annual price tag of $5 billion. The plan was to replace Western troops on the ground and exercise as a parallel force to the Afghan army of the former regime. At the time, U.S. officials rejected Prince's plan because it would mean “privatizing national credibility.”
Last February 25, it was leaked that Prince, even before Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President, sent his team a 26-page draft detailing a plan to privatize the mass deportations Trump promised on the campaign trail. This plan would involve mobilizing a fleet of a hundred aircraft and a “small army of U.S. citizens legitimized by the president to make arrests.” This plan, which would cost $26 billion, would be fully implemented before the 2026 midterm elections. By that date, some 12 million people would be deported, bypassing the most basic legal safeguards. The White House has remarked that Prince's draft is “unsolicited” and that these days they receive many “unsolicited” offers.
The use of Military and Private Security Companies (PMC) to perform tasks that should be reserved to the state is not new. The monopoly of the legitimate use of force is a domain that has traditionally been reserved to states, but nevertheless in the last decades the use of “conflict professionals” has increased. The end of the Cold War meant that the countries most involved, mainly the US, Russia, the UK and France, had much larger armies than the new threats they faced. This led to a large number of these military-trained personnel moving to the private sector and the creation of modern mercenary companies or “contractors”.
Open warfare and mass funerals with coffins decorated with the national flag became less and less popular. This caused governments, in order to avoid being electorally penalized, to resort more and more to contractors to intervene in conflicts. Although they are quite expensive in budgetary terms, no one loses elections for the funerals of anonymous coffins, without cameras and of people who go to war exclusively for the economic benefit. Likewise, contractors have fewer legal and moral controls when it comes to intervening than public employees, since they are only subject to compliance with the signed contract and the laws that apply to private citizens, which are more lax than those that guide the actions of public employees.
For that reason, the idea of the Trump administration using contractors to carry out mass deportations is not as far-fetched as it might seem. The roadmap to 2026 would require deporting 500,000 people per month, which would be a 600% increase over the current rate of deportations. This move represents one of the most massive human rights violations since the Stalin era, as well as having a devastating budgetary, economic, cultural and social impact on the country. The proposal implies reducing the country's population by approximately 3%, which in absolute terms would be equivalent to the total population of countries such as Tunisia, Bolivia or Belgium.
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