the South Americans going to fight in Ukraine

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Emílio Teixeira Alarcón thinks he knows exactly how he will feel after slaying his first Russian soldier. “Mission accomplished,” shrugged the Brazilian army reservist. “In war, it’s either kill or be killed.” “If I get someone in my crosshairs and don’t shoot, he might shoot me. It’s just like a game of paintball,” he added, as the mid-morning sun bathed his home in north Rio.

Paintball is the closest Alarcón, 43, has ever come to active combat. He served in his city’s 21st Field Artillery Regiment in the late 1990s before throwing himself into political activism and the battle against what he calls “the scourge of communism”. He has never left Brazil.

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The volunteers range from battle-hardened veterans of Colombia’s US-backed “war on drugs” to Argentinian students who have never picked up a gun and Brazilian Instagram influencers who have been criticised for putting lives at risk by using the conflict as clickbait.

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Uriel Saavedra, a former member of the Colombian police unit that protects government officials and VIPs, said he hoped to reach the battlefield within a fortnight after signing up to fight through a Colombia-based security firm. “If someone wants me to go to war in Ukraine, well, obviously they’re going to have to pay – because the risk of coming back dead is so high,” said Saavedra, 40, who expects to receive $10,000-a-month from the company which recruited him and about 30 other veterans. Saavedra, who saw the job advertised on a WhatsApp group for military and police veterans, recognised it was dangerous. “But we’re prepared. We can use any weapon they give us,” said the soldier of fortune who sees the war as a way of supplementing his $1,000-a-month state pension.

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Boa Morte said his son was horrified. “Damn it, Dad, are you nuts?” he had asked. But the reservist was determined to travel, despite concerns about sub-zero temperatures. “We’ll be so full of adrenaline when we arrive we won’t notice the cold,” Boa Morte said as he sat beside a swimming pool in a Rio sports club wearing flip-flops and shorts.

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Many of the Brazilian volunteers appear to be disciples of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper who is popular in the military rank and file. But Bolsonaro, who visited Moscow on the eve of Russia’s invasions and has seemed to take Putin’s side, has outraged some followers with his stance.

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Alarcón vowed to never again vote Bolsonaro. “I wanted to shoot the television,” his father, Emílio Galdeano, 68, said of the moment he saw Bolsonaro voice “solidarity” with Russia, nine days before war.

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