The impact of private war on mercenaries: the case of Steven Carr

In 1985, a twenty-something working-class Floridian named Steven Carr joined the Contra rebels in Costa Rica, spurred by President Ronald Reagan’s call for private Americans to help his undeclared war against the socialist regime in Nicaragua. After a brief firefight, Carr spent most of the next year and a half in prisons, and he died in a Los Angeles parking lot under mysterious circumstances. His tragedy allows scholars of private military enterprise to appreciate the underacknowledged vulnerable position in which governments have placed the foot soldiers of private militaries. The relationship of mercenaries vis-à-vis public policymakers has been precarious precisely because the former served the plausible deniability needs of the latter. Once engaged, mercenaries enjoyed the collaboration – or at least tacit approval – of governments. If lone individuals crossed them, however, those governments could easily abandon and even persecute mercenaries. Carr’s cautionary tale is a study in consequences for would-be mercenaries, those who hire them, and those who study them. It also speaks to a transitional period of the late Cold War when anti-communism, anti-decolonisation, and rising beliefs in privatisation heightened dangers for individual mercenaries.