Keep Jerry Torres away from Ethiopia and the Amhara struggle

He’s not a friend to Amhara. He’s no friend to Ethiopia. In fact, he’s downright toxic for Africa and the rest of the global south.

There’s a disturbing rumor going around Washington — which okay, is only as trustworthy as rumors go — that Donald Trump could make failed GOP congressional candidate Jerry Torres his ambassador to Ethiopia.

Given that the Democrats’ man in Addis is Ervin Massinga, a slimeball happy to shill for Abiy’s resorts and who even helped broker talks between TPLF factions (a jaw-dropping breach of ethics for any envoy), you’d think anyone would be an improvement.

Torres would not be it.

For those who don’t know, Torres got spectacularly trounced by his Democratic rival when he tried last year to capture the Eighth District in Virginia. The numbers show it truly was a shellacking (he didn’t even break 25 percent of the vote), but worse, the result also shows the Ethiopian diaspora bloc doesn’t carry as much power as it may think it has.

Torres made many efforts to court the Ethiopian diaspora vote, and more interestingly, publicly came out in support of the struggle against the Amhara Genocide. He appeared at the Amhara Global Diaspora Conference 2024, which I also addressed by Zoom. “In all my heart, in all my belief, in all my soul, and all my thought, I’m going to do everything I can to stop what is happening to the Amharas and Ethiopians,” he promised at the Grand Amhara Rally in DC last November.

To no great surprise, his personal account on X has nothing to say about the issue since he lost the election, nor does his campaign account, which goes silent after November 5. It’s crickets. Well, you might say, that’s a typical politician.

Only Torres is outright dangerous, and he’s suckered Amhara and other diaspora Ethiopians into thinking he’s an ally. Instead, his record in business, his dealings in Africa, and the company he keeps all suggest he’s a predator.

That diaspora Ethiopians and Amhara in particular let themselves be duped says a lot about the desperation people feel and how they are ready to embrace anyone who pours the right syrup and claims to be a friend.

The truth about Torres has been right in plain sight for years, if people bothered to look. So, it would be an utter disaster if he were given any position or role that has influence on Ethiopia-U.S. relations… or indeed, American relations with the rest of Africa. Let’s go through it.

For one thing, he’s a mercenary who’s made his fortune, in part, off African misery. A former Green Beret, he founded Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions. As the Guardian succinctly put it, his company “has operated as a security contractor on six continents, including in authoritarian regimes in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.”

Then Torres got into hot water with U.S. government authorities over how he did business in Iraq, and this is where you might want to think twice about believing he is any friend to Africans.

In 2010, his company was small fry in a landscape of several, bigger private military contractors, who with the Pentagon all apparently thought it was just dandy to recruit ex-militia members and ex-soldiers from Sierra Leone and buy ’em cheap. Lured to Iraq in a campaign literally called an “Overseas Youth Employment Program,” they found themselves “at the bottom of a racial hierarchy of security workers,” sometimes stuck in the job of cleaning toilets.

This same year, Torres flew to Iraq and lobbied hard to get “hundreds of Sierra Leonian armed security guards to protect Forward Operating Base Shield, a U.S. military base in Baghdad.” And then he had them deployed anyway — without getting the proper clearances, without these guards being properly vetted and approved.

For putting their lives on the line and for them cleaning toilets, guess what Torres’ company paid the Sierra Leone recruits? In 2010, they earned the princely sum of $250 U.S. a month.

Does this sound like someone who cares about the welfare and safety of Africans?

The bipartisan congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting wanted to ask Torres about the Forward Operating Base Shield, only he chose not to show up to its hearing to respond to its questions.

Nor was this the end of legal woes for his company. There were allegations back in 2014 of “financial ‘kickbacks’ made by Torres AES’s local subsidiary to ministry of justice officials” in Pakistan. The next year there were “allegations that the company paid bribes in order to obtain the local weapons permits needed in order to fulfill their US government contracts.”

In December of 2016, Torres AES landed a multi-year, no doubt highly profitable contract to provide Shell with security services in South America. Shell, of course, is one of the most sinister corporations operating in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, where it played a despicable role in getting Ken Saro-Wiwa persecuted and executed, and where it just got caught ignoring warnings about its latest disastrous oil spill and botched “cleanup” in Ogoniland.

And it gets worse. Torres’ company was not above employing Joe Kent, another former Green Beret who is now Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center. The problem is that Kent likes to get cozy with white nationalists and neo-Nazi figures, such as Nick Fuentes and Greyson Arnold. The paper trail for just where Kent was working while he ran for office in 2022 (which turned into a news story saga all by itself) led eventually back to Torres’ security firm, which changed its name in 2020 to the reassuringly bland “Continuity Global Solutions.”

What does all this mean for Ethiopians who care about where their country is going? And for those who care about how much worse things could get for Amhara, Afar, Gurage, political activists, journalists…? Hell, you name it.

Torres has talked a great game, persuading many diaspora citizen he cares, he really cares.

Only the record shows differently. A guy who does business with some of the ugliest, most brutal regimes around the world, a guy who paid Africans a crap wage while putting them at risk, a guy who has employed a creep (Kent) who at best is another conspiracy theorist MAGA idiot and at worst, may share the disgustingly racist opinions of his associates.

Do you want this person anywhere near Ethiopia now?

Especially when like Musk and other Trump appointees, he apparently doesn’t see it as a country to befriend and help flourish economically but as just another market where his poorly trained security goons can be posted.

Ethiopians deserve better. So do diaspora Ethiopians. But frankly speaking, they have also let themselves down. Because all it took was proper checking on the Internet to find out what this war profiteer is really about.

You didn’t know? Then shame on you. Shame on the leadership of the major diaspora organizations who didn’t check. Shame on the willingly gullible who cheered the guy at his appearances.

Shame on all of us who are Amhara allies for not looking hard enough sooner.

Good friends and supporters for the cause are indeed rare these days. That’s terrible — a constant challenge.

But it does give you enough space and time that you can verify if these individuals are actually true friends in the first place.