Manuel Barrios joined the fight against Russian forces in Ukraine because a bank threatened to foreclose on his house in Colombia. Luis Alejandro Herrera returned to the front to recover the savings he had lost in a failed attempt to enter the United States through Mexico. Jhoan Cerón fought to care for his toddler.

All three died in a war that their relatives said they knew little about or cared little about.

They were among hundreds of Colombian veterans who volunteered to fight for Ukraine for the chance to earn at least three times what they can make at home.

“He said that because of great need he was fighting a war in a country that was not his,” said Mr. Barrios’ wife, Maria Cubillos.

The stories of Colombian volunteers highlight the changing nature of the war in Ukraine, which has transformed from a fast-paced struggle for national survival into a war of attrition. Heavy losses and stalled battles force both sides to look for new groups of fighters to replenish their ranks.

For Ukraine, the mainly Western foreign volunteers who arrived last year because of moral conviction, a search for adventure or hatred of Russia are being supplemented by fighters from poorer countries who more closely resemble the legal definition of mercenaries – soldiers driven to foreign conflicts by financial gain .

“I would dare say that not a single Colombian went there to defend democracy,” said Cristian Pérez, who retired as a sniper in the Colombian army, worked under private security contracts abroad and is considering serving in Ukraine going to fight. ‘I don’t think they even heard of Ukraine before the war. Everything comes down to economic motives.”

Colombia offers fertile ground for recruitment, as decades of fighting Marxist insurgencies and drug cartels have given the country the largest army in South America.

Yet foreign fighters make up a small part of the Ukrainian military.

Ukraine’s enemy, Russia, has had to place much more emphasis on financial benefits, including life insurance and subsidized mortgages, to attract volunteers. And Russia has also exploited global economic turmoil to attract fighters driven by financial need, including men with limited military experience from Central Asia, Nepal and Cuba.

And as the fighting turns into inconclusive, brutal trench warfare, material motivations become even more prominent.

The Ukrainian military would not provide estimates on the number of Colombian or other foreign fighters in its ranks, citing operational security. The Colombian government also did not provide figures, stressing that the volunteers, although still citizens, no longer have ties to Colombian institutions.

Interviews with four Colombian volunteers who served in Ukraine, as well as a review of audio and text messages sent by fighters there, show that there are hundreds of Colombian volunteers in Ukraine at any given time.

“We welcome help from every citizen of the world who is willing to fight evil,” said Oleksandr Shahuri, a spokesman for one of the main military units employing Colombian volunteers, the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine, also known as known as the Foreign Legion. .

Colombia, a country of 50 million people, has long exported experienced fighters. A security alliance with the United States has made their soldiers among the best trained and equipped in Latin America, and prolonged combat has given them experience matched by few traditional militaries.

For poor Colombian men, the military has long offered one of the few legal paths to some financial security. Retired professional soldiers in Colombia receive a lifetime monthly pension of $400 to $600, as well as free health care for their families.

Yet these benefits are often not enough to make ends meet and many realize that the skills they honed in the jungles and mountains have little use in civilian life.

“All we know is how to use weapons,” said Andrés, a retired Colombian soldier who served in Ukraine, who asked that his last name be withheld for fear of harming his career prospects.

Some veterans end up joining organized crime groups. A man interviewed for this article said he worked for a Mexican cartel for three months.

Those who continue to work in the legal economy tend to become bodyguards, a job that pays veterans of elite units up to about $1,000 per month, a higher-than-average salary, but still rarely enough to meet their financial goals .

And competition for jobs is growing. A peace deal between the government and Colombia’s largest rebel group in 2016 significantly reduced the size of the country’s military.

Economic pressure is pushing Colombian veterans abroad. Many covet lucrative security contracts in the Middle Eastern oil states, although these positions are typically only open to men under forty, disqualifying most retired Colombian professional soldiers.

Some foreign assignments have led to scandals. Two dozen retired Colombian commandos are on trial in Haiti and the United States for their involvement in the 2021 assassination of a Haitian president.

The war in Ukraine gives Colombian veterans a rare opportunity to change their fortunes as they fight for an internationally recognized government backed by the United States.

“He always had the ambition to be something more,” said Paola Ortiz, the widow of Mr. Herrera, the late Colombian soldier, who returned to Ukraine for a second tour this year after being deported from the United States. “He wanted to send his kids to college, buy a house, open a business.”

Rumors of combat possibilities in Ukraine began spreading through Colombian veterans’ chat groups last year, as the initial flow of idealistic Western volunteers into the country began to level off.

More than a dozen Colombian veterans and their family members described the volunteering process in interviews.

Colombian men travel alone to Poland and often sell valuable possessions, such as cars, to finance the trip.

At the Ukrainian border, they use translation apps to tell border guards that they have military experience and want to fight for Ukraine. Once in the country, they present themselves at a military base in the western city of Ternopil.

After an interview and a perfunctory medical examination, they are placed on a waiting list for one of the two main destinations for Latin American fighters: the Foreign Legion or the Carpathian Sich 49th Infantry Battalion.

They open a local bank account and send debit cards to their families so they can withdraw money from a Colombian ATM

Colombian soldiers said they were paid about $3,000 a month in Ukrainian currency, roughly in line with local soldiers’ salaries.

At the front they said they had experienced a very different war against the insurgents than they had known.

Close combat with automatic weapons in dense terrain was replaced by bombing in vulnerable areas. And they could not count on the air superiority they enjoyed in Colombia during air raids or evacuations.

“Those who want to come here should think about it first,” a Colombian volunteer said in an audio message sent to a veteran chat group in October. “Colombia is child’s play compared to here. When a rocket explodes near you for the first time, you see the devil face to face.”

The man, whose identity is being withheld because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that of the 60 Colombians who had joined him, only seven remained. The rest were killed, wounded or returned home after a few weeks at the front.

After arriving in Ukraine in February, Mr. Barrios told his wife that the fighting was more dangerous than he expected.

He decided to go to Ukraine after the bank threatened to foreclose on his house, weeks after his wife, Mrs. Cubillos, gave birth to their third child. His nurse’s salary could not cover the loan payments, Ms. Cubillos said.

“Come back, don’t leave me alone with these children,” I kept telling him,” Ms. Cubillos said in an interview in the Colombian city of Neiva. “But he just repeated, ‘No honey, I have to save the house.’”

Mr. Barrios died in a rocket attack after 20 days on the front lines, too early to earn even a single salary.

According to Ukrainian lawfamilies of service members killed in combat would receive a $411,000 payment.

But Ms Cubillos said she had no money for a lawyer or a plane ticket to travel to Ukraine to file the compensation claim in person.

She remains liable for his debts and says the bank continues to threaten to foreclose on her house.

Her only memory of her husband’s Ukrainian service is a box with the flags of Ukraine and the Foreign Legion, which was delivered with his body.

“I wanted to throw this all away. Instead of him, I got a box with a flag that means nothing to me,” Ms. Cubillos said. “But I want the baby to know his father’s story, to show what came back from him.”

Thomas Gibbons-Neff And Natalia Novosolova contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.

The four children who survived an almost unfathomable 40 days in the Colombian jungle after their small plane crashed in the Amazon rainforest had boarded the plane fleeing for their lives.

Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest survivors, explained in an interview that an armed group that forcibly recruited children by threatening violence had taken control of their home region in southern Colombia.

Fearing that their family was next, relatives had tried to fly the children out of the area to a town where they could live safely.

Then the children’s escape plane crashed, killing their mother and two other adults and sending the quartet on a traumatic week-long survival trek in the Amazon jungle. The eldest of the children, Lesly, 13, played the role of guide and mother to her siblings, helping them navigate the forest.

“I was very afraid that the children would be recruited,” said Mr Ranoque, speaking by phone like others. He added that the country’s armed groups “have no respect – they are capable of recruiting a child as young as 2 years old.”

The rescue of the children last week provided a rare moment of united celebration in a deeply divided nation, with broad sections of society, from left to right, praising the search team’s work. Gustavo Petro, the country’s leftist president, called the rescue “magical”, and Iván Duque, his conservative predecessor, called it “a miracle.”

But the story of the children — Lesly, Soleiny, 9, Tien, 5, and Cristin, 1 — all from the Huitoto Indigenous group, is also a stark reminder of the dangers thousands of rural Colombian children face every day.

For decades, the country has been terrorized by armed groups, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. In 2016, the FARC agreed to lay down its arms. But the state never took control of many places where the rebels once thrived.

Caught in the middle of these warring factions are Colombia’s rural citizens, and children are the youngest victims, suffering displacement, recruitment, and the death and disappearance of family members and community leaders.

The indigenous reservation where the children live, next to the town of Araracuara in the Amazonas department, is extremely remote, according to their great-uncle Fidencio Valencia. “There is no sewage system; there is no electricity,” he said. “There is nothing. We have been abandoned, all of us, by the state.”

Residents in and around Araracuara have been the target of violence in recent months, according to Colombia’s ombudsman, which is investigating human rights violations and has blamed killings and recruitment of children in the area on a group of FARC dissidents calling themselves the Carolina Ramírez Front.

“People live in fear and are very afraid to speak out because you have to protect your family,” said an Araracuara resident, a Huitoto woman who asked not to use her name, out of concern for her safety.

At least two other armed groups operate in the region, she said.

The Carolina Ramírez Front occasionally issues statements via social media, but has not commented on the matter.

The head of the Colombian army, Major General Helder Giraldo, said in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday that officials were aware of Mr Ranoque’s statements about the armed group and were monitoring the situation.

In the jungle, the effort to find the children after their plane crashed, dubbed Operation Hope by the government, was led by the Colombian military and members of the Indigenous Guard, an unarmed civilian defense force made up of tens of thousands of people from various tribes. About 300 people took part in the search, according to the military.

Lesly helped her siblings by building shelter, finding food and cheering them up, said Luis Acosta, the National Coordinator for the Indigenous Guard, who was part of the search team and spoke to the group that eventually found the children.

Indigenous children in the region are taught from an early age at home and school how to understand the jungle both practically and spiritually, Mr Acosta, who is from another tribe, told Nasa. Lesly would most likely have been willing to take care of her younger siblings.

“From the age of 13, we’re already taking on adult roles,” he said, “because we have to be on the territory. In life, we’ve had to do it this way.”

Wild animals, poisonous snakes and poisonous plants are all present in the Colombian Amazon. Officials have said the children survived by eating wild fruits and cassava flour that came from the plane’s wreckage and survival kits dropped by helicopters.

Mr Acosta said the search team spent 20 nights sleeping in hammocks near the crash site and would travel in groups during the day to look for the children.

For subsistence, members of the search team ate a cracker-like bread known as casabe, as well as canned food, river fish, and mojojoy, a type of larvae found in palm trees.

Whenever they found a trace of the kids — a footprint, a diaper — that suggested a sign of life, they were encouraged, he said. Whenever it rained too hard to search, they were discouraged.

Brig. General Pedro Sánchez, who led Operation Hope, said trees in the jungle can grow 100 feet or more, blocking light and making it difficult to see anyone just a few feet away.

The search team dropped fliers from helicopters and played messages from the children’s grandmother in the Huitoto language telling them to stay put and wait for help.

General Sánchez said the children heard the messages and saw the leaflets, but kept moving, making them difficult to find.

“Why did they move?” he said. “Only they know.”

On June 9, four indigenous members of the search team found the children less than four miles west of the crash site, General Sánchez said. They found Lesly with the 1-year-old in her arms. The 5-year-old boy was under a mosquito net, he said, and the children explained that they were hungry. (The two youngest had birthdays in the jungle.)

Then they reunited with the commandos, who gave the children first aid and fluids. A helicopter soon arrived to air them out of the jungle. As of Tuesday, they stayed in a military hospital in Bogotá.

“When the boy saw the indigenous people, he said: ‘My mother is dead,'” General Sánchez said. The rescuers tried to shift the conversation by saying, “Your grandmother is waiting for you and she is looking for you.”

Four Colombian children who survived 40 days in the Colombian jungle after their plane crashed were eager to play and asked for books to read, officials said Saturday, a day after the group was rescued.

The siblings, aged 1 to 13, were recovering in a military hospital in Bogotá, the capital, and were said to be in good health and spirits on Saturday when they were visited by President Gustavo Petro and other officials.

The country has been enthralled by the children’s story, with many eagerly awaiting news of their fate since their plane crashed on May 1. The children, members of the Huitoto indigenous community, had been traveling with their mother and an indigenous leader from the small Amazon region. community of Araracuara, Colombia, to San José del Guaviare, a small town in central Colombia along the Guaviare River.

When rescuers reached the crash site last month, the bodies of the three adults they were traveling with were found, but no trace of the children.

Officials had said in recent weeks they had reason to believe the children had survived the crash. When news of their survival and discovery broke on Friday, the country erupted in revelry.

Carlos Rincón, the military doctor who evaluated the children, said they survived with only minor cuts and abrasions. In photos released by the government on Friday, the children look thin and the doctor said they have not yet been given solid food. He said he expected they could be discharged from the hospital within two to three weeks.

Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, who was one of the officials who visited the children, praised the eldest, Lesly Mucutuy, 13, for ensuring the group’s survival.

“We must not only recognize her courage, but also her leadership,” he said. “It was thanks to her that the three little siblings were able to survive by her side, with her care, with her knowledge of the jungle.”

Lesly’s 9-year-old sister, Soleiny, “talks a lot,” said Astrid Cáceres, director of the country’s child welfare service. Ten, 5, asks for books to read, while the 1-year-old has “a composure to work with the nurses that you can’t imagine,” Ms Cáceres added.

“Lesly smiled at us, gave us hugs,” she said. “She wants to play, she’s bored in bed.”

Two of the children had their birthdays during their stay in the jungle. Ten turned five and the youngest, Cristin, turned one.

“The celebration of birthdays is too late,” Ms Cáceres said at the press conference. “So we are inviting the country to celebrate at this time.

The government has given few details about the whereabouts of the children.

Special forces found the children late Friday afternoon by following footprints and traces of food, a military spokesman said.

The children were “very weak,” he said. “I think if a few more days had passed, we wouldn’t have found them alive.”

“Miracle, miracle, miracle was the key word to report that they found them,” he added.

In a coordinated search called Operation Hope, soldiers and Native people traveled about 2,650 miles in search of the siblings.

After visiting the hospital with his wife and two daughters, President Petro took to Twitter to praise the cooperation between the army and indigenous groups and “respect for the jungle”.

“Here is another path for Colombia,” he wrote. “I believe this is the true path to peace.”

After 40 days in the Colombian rainforest, all four children who had been missing since the plane they were traveling on crashed on May 1 have been found alive, Colombia’s president said.

“They have achieved an example of total survival that will go down in history,” President Gustavo Petro said at a news conference Friday night.

When rescuers reached the plane wreckage site last month, the bodies of the three adults on board were found, but there was no sign of the four children known to be on the plane.

In a case that stunned the nation, local indigenous communities from the remote region, along with the Colombian military, then began scouring the jungle for the children, ages 13, 9, 4 and 1.

The children are “weak” and receiving medical care, Mr. Petro said.

The Defense Ministry said in a press release that the children were initially treated by combat medics from the special operations forces deployed in the search, but were transferred to the military base in the city of San José del Guaviare. where they were in stable condition. They will be transferred to a military hospital in Bogotá tomorrow to recover, the statement said.

“We want to share the happiness of all Colombian people with this true miracle that we have known tonight,” Defense Minister Iván Velásquez said in a video posted on social media.

Details remain unclear about who found the children and how they managed to survive for so long in the dense jungle, prone to heavy rains and home to jaguars and venomous snakes.

“It’s a real miracle. It will be news for years to come,” Pedro Arenas, a human rights activist in San Jose del Guaviare, told The New York Times. “After 40 days, it’s pretty incredible news. So there is a lot of joy, there is real happiness.”

The children, members of the Huitoto indigenous community, had traveled with their mother and an indigenous leader from the small Amazonian community of Araracuara, Colombia, to San José del Guaviare, a small town in central Colombia along the Guaviare River. -river. The pilot reported an engine failure and declared an emergency before the aircraft disappeared from radar at around 07:30 on 1 May.

The Colombian Air Force and other branches of the military soon deployed search and rescue aircraft and helicopters, as well as land and river teams. Indigenous communities in the region joined the effort.

Using a loudspeaker that produces sound loud enough to be heard within a radius of about a mile, they played a recording made by the children’s grandmother in Huitoto, their native language, and told the children that they had to stay in one place and that people were looking for them. .

Conflicting details about the case have left many Colombians confused and angry. On May 17, Mr. Petro announced on Twitter that the children had been found alive, and then the next day withdrew the good newssaying that the national child welfare agency, the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare, had received incorrect information.

In recent weeks, authorities said they had reason to believe the children were still alive, pointing to footprints, diapers and shoes found in the search.

“They took care of themselves. It is their knowledge of the indigenous families, their knowledge of how to live in the jungle, that saved them,” Mr. Petro said at the press conference. “They are children of the jungle. And now they are children of Colombia.”

Federico Rios contributed reporting from Madrid.