Colombia Fighters Tied To Sudan Genocide Spark Sweeping U.S. Crackdown
A new U.S. Treasury press release exposes a Colombia-led mercenary pipeline sending ex-soldiers to Sudan, recruiting even children for the Rapid Support Forces, and triggering sanctions that test Latin America’s uneasy place in today’s global security marketplace of power.
Colombian Fighters In A Distant African War
In a stark press release from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions on four individuals and four entities tied to a transnational recruitment machine that has quietly moved hundreds of former Colombian military personnel into Sudan’s brutal civil war. At the center of the action is a network that, according to U.S. authorities, not only supplies experienced fighters to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) but also trains soldiers, including children, to fight for a force already accused of some of the worst atrocities of the conflict.
The sanctions come amid what Washington describes as the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. Since fighting erupted in April 2023, the RSF and allied militias have repeatedly targeted civilians, systematically killing men and boys, even infants, and using rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls. They have blocked access to lifesaving aid and turned entire regions into zones of terror. Supported in part by these Colombian recruits, the RSF captured El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, on October 26, 2025, after an 18‑month siege, and then carried out mass killings, ethnically targeted torture, and widespread sexual violence. On January 7, 2025, the U.S. Department of State formally determined that members of the RSF had committed genocide.
For Latin Americans, especially in Colombia, the notion that veterans of a decades-long internal conflict are now fighting and training child soldiers in Sudan has a bitter familiarity. Scholars writing in the Journal of Peace Research and the Journal of Latin American Studies have long warned that demobilized fighters, if left with limited economic options, can become part of a global security labor market that stretches from the Middle East to Africa. The Treasury’s account makes that abstract pattern uncomfortably concrete: the ghosts of one war walking into another, thousands of kilometers away.
Washington frames the civil war in Sudan not only as a catastrophe for Darfur and Khartoum, but as a threat to regional stability and a potential haven for actors who may target the United States. The U.S. government insists it remains committed to the September 12, 2025, Joint Statement on Restoring Peace and Security in Sudan, which calls for a three‑month humanitarian truce, a permanent ceasefire, and a transparent transition to an independent, civilian‑led government. The same statement urges external players to stop funnelling money and weapons to the warring parties, precisely the kind of support this Colombian-led network is accused of enabling. The investigation behind the designations, Treasury notes, was carried out in partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center, an institutional reminder of how financial systems and border controls intersect when war travels by contract and wire transfer rather than by formal mobilization.
From Bogotá Job Offers To Trenches In Khartoum
According to the Treasury narrative, the story accelerates in September 2024, when “hundreds” of former Colombian military personnel began traveling to Sudan to fight alongside the RSF. These recruits serve as infantry and artillerymen, drone pilots, vehicle operators, and instructors, with some involved in training children to fight. They have been deployed across key battlefields, from Khartoum and Omdurman to Kordofan and El Fasher.
Behind those movements stands Álvaro Andrés Quijano Becerra, known as Quijano, a dual Colombian‑Italian national and retired Colombian officer now based in the United Arab Emirates. Treasury describes him as a former associate of the Norte del Valle Cartel, now repurposing his networks to build a private export market in violence. Around him is a lattice of companies that recruit, contract, and pay the fighters while obscuring who is actually hiring them.
In Bogotá, the International Services Agency (A4SI) functions as the central recruiting hub. Co‑founded by Quijano, the firm advertised positions for drone operators, snipers, and translators through its website, group chats, and townhalls. A4SI is formally owned and managed by Claudia Viviana Oliveros Forero, or Oliveros, Quijano’s wife. To reduce legal exposure and blur the chain of responsibility, A4SI relies on Panama‑based Global Staffing S.A., now operating as Talent Bridge, S.A., to sign contracts and receive funds. The Treasury press release notes that Global Staffing’s website is identical to A4SI’s, and that Oliveros herself was, until recently, Global Staffing’s president and treasurer and remains tied to it as a company subscriber.
Another crucial node is Maine Global Corp S.A.S. (Maine Global Corp), a Bogotá‑based employment agency managed by dual Colombian‑Spanish national Mateo Andrés Duque Botero, better known as Duque. He appears across corporate registries as shareholder, president, director, or manager of firms in Colombia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Maine Global Corp manages and disburses funds for Global Staffing and the unnamed company hiring the Colombian fighters, with assistance from U.S.-based firms linked to Duque. Those firms process payroll for the fighters and act as foreign exchange intermediaries, converting euros and Colombian pesos into U.S. dollars. In 2024 and 2025, Treasury says, these U.S.-based companies executed numerous wire transfers totaling millions of dollars to Maine Global Corp, Global Staffing, and the hiring company.
The network reaches further through Monica Muñoz Ucros, alternate manager of Maine Global Corp and manager of Comercializadora San Bendito (San Bendito), also based in Bogotá. San Bendito engaged in wire transfers both with a U.S. company associated with Duque and directly with Duque himself. The result is a web in which recruiters, payroll processors, and shell companies in Colombia, Panama, the United States, and other jurisdictions converge on Sudan’s conflict zones. As research in International Security has highlighted, modern war economies often hinge less on overt state sponsorship and more on such diffuse, privately brokered arrangements.
Sanctions, Behavior Change, And Colombia’s Role In A Global War Economy
To break that web, OFAC is wielding Executive Order 14098 (E.O. 14098), which targets persons “destabilizing Sudan and undermining the goal of a democratic transition.” Quijano and A4SI are designated under this authority for being foreign persons responsible for, complicit in, or directly or indirectly engaged in actions or policies that threaten Sudan’s peace, security, or stability. Oliveros is designated for her leadership role in A4SI, a blocked entity. Global Staffing is designated for being owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, A4SI.
Maine Global Corp is designated to provide material, financial, or technological support to Global Staffing. Duque and Muñoz are each selected for their leadership roles at Maine Global Corp, whose property and interests are now blocked. Finally, San Bendito is designated for being owned or controlled by, or acting on behalf of, Muñoz, herself a blocked person under E.O. 14098.
The practical effect is sweeping. All property and interests in property of these designated individuals and entities that are in the United States, or in the possession or control of U.S. persons, are blocked and must be reported to OFAC. Any entity that is 50 percent or more owned, directly or indirectly, by one or more blocked persons is automatically treated as blocked, even if not named. Unless authorized by a license or exempt, U.S. sanctions regulations bar all transactions by U.S. persons, or within or transiting the United States, that involve the property or interests in property of these sanctioned actors.
Violations can bring civil or criminal penalties for both U.S. and foreign persons. OFAC can impose civil penalties on a strict liability basis, meaning intent is not required; its Economic Sanctions Enforcement Guidelines outline the factors it considers in deciding how to act. Financial institutions and businesses risk exposure to sanctions by dealing with designated or otherwise blocked individuals and companies, whether by sending funds, providing services, or receiving value from them. As legal scholars have noted in the Georgetown Journal of International Law, this kind of secondary exposure is what gives U.S. sanctions their extraterritorial reach, pressing foreign firms to choose between dubious contracts and access to the U.S. financial system.
Yet the Treasury press release also stresses that the power of OFAC sanctions comes not just from the ability to add names to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List) but from a willingness to remove them when the law allows. The stated goal is not punishment for its own sake, but a behavior change. There is a formal process for those seeking delisting through petitions, as described in OFAC guidance on filing for removal from an OFAC list.
Seen from Colombia, this case feels like a grim convergence of histories: a country still healing from internal war supplying trained fighters to a faraway conflict where genocide has been declared; a global financial system that can trace wire transfers in real time but struggles to prevent young men, and even children, from being drawn into organized violence; a sanctions regime trying to shape behavior without directly touching the structural inequalities that make mercenary work attractive. Studies in the Journal of Latin American Studies and World Development have underlined how poverty, demobilization, and limited civilian employment can push former combatants into risk-laden jobs abroad.
In that sense, the Treasury’s action is more than a legal notice. It is a reminder that the borders between Colombia’s past war and Sudan’s current horror are more porous than maps suggest, and that the decisions made in Washington, Bogotá, and Khartoum are now entangled in a single, uneasy war economy that spans the Global South and North alike.
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