Mercenary Boss Erik Prince’s Political and Commercial Motivations in Venezuela
Orinoco Tribune, September 14, 2024 —
In an article published earlier by Misión Verdad, journalist Robert Inlakesh argued that US businessman and founder of the mercenary group Blackwater, Erik Prince, was looking for an opportunity as a military contractor. Thus, he made the public proposal on X to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro by force.
For that purpose, he joined a campaign called Ya Casi Venezuela, whose objectives are unclear, raising doubts about the type of operation the ex-Navy SEAL could promote so far in advance on social media.
According to the opposition journalist David Placer, based in Madrid, there is a fundraising operation with the aim of collecting $600 million for military purposes. But the truth is that there is much more speculation than certainty surrounding the intrigue.
This is not the first time Erik Prince has tried to conduct a military mission outside the United States in recent years. In 2022, he proposed the creation of a private military company with the remaining soldiers of the Ukrainian army to fight against the Russian Special Military Operation. He was unable to carry it out due to a lack of approval from the US and Ukrainian military commanders.
Blackwater’s track record in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, put Prince’s role in conflict contexts under scrutiny. However, he has been an active political operator and lobbyist in Washington ever since.
Direct connection with Washington and US political establishment
Prince has taken advantage of the benefits of belonging to a wealthy family well-positioned in the US business and political arena. As a young man, he served as an intern in the White House, an experience that marked him for the rest of his life. From this, he cemented his relationship with politicians of the Republican Party and figures of the traditional and conservative right.
Since the 2000s, Prince has been a regular contributor to Republican legislators almost exclusively. His extensive track record encompasses donating to political campaigns of Republican Party Congress members and senators, lobbying payments, funding support for legislation, and so on.
His involvement in the political arena conditioned contracts in Blackwater’s favor, and he became a quoted figure in media and books—even laudatory biographies—advocating for US imperialism.
Reports that Prince, heir to a Michigan fortune, has strong ties to Republicans and conservative Christian groups dating back to 2007. Since then, he has belonged to those circles and the public eye.
A lengthy Vanity Fair feature of Erik Prince and his sister, Betsy DeVos, indicates that it runs in the family to map its political goals with business goals, of course, in a country where corporations have a say, by right of business, in setting the policies of the federal government and the legislative regime.
This position is in keeping with many in Donald Trump’s closest political circle and, indeed, both Prince and DeVos have been stalwarts within pro-Trump circles since the mogul’s inauguration as president.
Prince’s sister was the secretary of education during the Trump administration. Prince was considered a “shadow advisor” to the Republican president. Prince’s stellar participation in a spying operation against politicians opposed to the Republican president further undermined his public persona, along with scandals involving the company he founded, from which he disassociated himself for political and commercial marketing reasons.
With support from Trump, Prince tried to become a senator for the state of Wyoming in 2017, but the Republican establishment did not allow it. Prince was accused of wanting to profit from the then-US occupation in Afghanistan, whitewashing his image as a businessman convicted by the law, and promoting the Trumpist agenda in the Senate.
A 2017 NBC News report commented, “Prince now runs Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based logistics company with Chinese investors. The Hong Kong-listed firm recently acquired a 25% stake in a private security training school. It also landed a contract to provide security and logistics for an investment authority in a Somali free trade zone.”
Prince combines these business practices with his political zeal to stay connected to not only the US establishment but also to the whole Western establishment. In a New Republic article published on May 30, journalist Ken Silverstein revealed that Prince runs a WhatsApp chat group for those close to him, including “a menagerie of right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists” where they discuss Biden, “cultural Marxism,” Israel and Palestine, Yemen and Iran and, of course, explosive measures against those West Asian countries.
Silverstein recounts that the group includes “Icons of the MAGA ecosphere such as Tucker Carlson, the most revered figure among group chat participants, with the exception of the Supreme Leader himself; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.; and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser. Flynn has participated, Carlson only minimally, and Guilfoyle not at all.”
Prince is a well-known figure within Trump’s circles and the Republican Party in general. He remains active on the Washington scene with no lasting successes. Venezuela likely enters into his equation of reinserting himself as a relevant figure among Republicans, neoconservatives, and other imperialist political groups in the United States.
Military entrepreneurship?
At a 2019 conference attended by several US liberal and conservative right-wing media figures in New York, Prince argued that the United States’ greatest threat is not terrorism or Russia but “socialism masquerading as liberalism. It’s the sort of Trojan horse that can sneak the 16th Amendment into the Constitution and force people to pay taxes.”
He said he believes the “free market” can fix what the federal government naturally harms. “We have to privatize whenever possible,” Prince said at the time, adding that “the entrepreneurial spirit made America great.”
His careers in private business and politics are in harmony with these concepts, which he advocates for taking to the next level. He calls himself a “libertarian.”
In August of this year, Prince participated with a small group of conservative lawmakers who announced their own investigation into the attack on Donald Trump in July. The group “presented a panel of expert testimony in the style of a congressional hearing” via streaming. However, it was not an official event.
Rather, it was an attempt to install a parallel institution to that of the members of the official bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempt against the former president and now Republican presidential candidate.
Panelists included Erik Prince and “Ben Shaffer, a police SWAT team officer who was present at the July 13 assassination attempt, sitting in a room a few blocks from the Capitol.”
“Led by Representatives Cory Mills and Crane, along with Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, and Chip Roy, this group of lawmakers says it has no confidence in what will come out of any of the investigations taking place inside and outside Congress,” the news report on the event recounts.
It is striking that this distrust in the official authorities to carry out the investigation in an efficient manner is similar to Prince’s argument to plan a military operation in Venezuela, unofficial but with huge political marketing overtones. It is just another business opportunity for him, with “socialism” and the current Venezuelan situation as an excuse.
The highly profitable sector in which private military contractors operate is so deeply embedded in the US political system that mercenary firms certainly have very little to fear from political power in the hands of Republicans or Democrats in Washington. For military contractors like Prince, this is very good news.
This, however, does not imply that if Prince sells an invasion of Venezuela, a hypothetical new Trump administration would automatically approve the point of account. In fact, it has been quite the opposite since Prince was indicted for Blackwater’s crimes in Iraq, but that has not distanced him from his political and business obsessions. Citing the aforementioned work by Inlakesh, “according to four sources cited by Reuters, in 2019, Prince was pressuring the Trump administration aiming to deploy a private army in Venezuela to overthrow the democratically elected socialist leader Nicolás Maduro.”
The London-based journalist clarified that “on the record, Prince spent months trying to secure political and financial support for that project.” In other words, it was another failed business opportunity.
But Prince’s proposal on X, together with the expectation of the Ya Casi Venezuela campaign, seems to aim at raising his profile among Republicans in the scenario of another Trump administration in the near future, just like Elon Musk has shown in the Venezuelan postelectoral context.