1.

A NEW POVERTY DRAFT: MILITARY CONTRACTORS TARGET LATIN AMERICA FOR NEW RECRUITS

** Halliburton and other private military contractors have begun advertising campaigns in El Salvador, Colombia and Nicaragua to recruit ex-soldiers to work in Iraq. **

Democracy Now!
December 23, 2004

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/1541224

With the situation in Iraq becoming more and more deadly and the resistance gaining increasing popular support inside the country, the Bush administration has begun sending thousands more U.S. troops to Baghdad. But many question how many more troops the administration can afford to send, or more important, how many soldiers it can send. The U.S. military is facing an unprecedented crisis in recruiting numbers and new enlistments. Meanwhile, new Pentagon statistics show that more than 5,000 soldiers have now been charged with desertion from bases in the U.S. and overseas since the invasion of Iraq in early 2003.

In some circles, there is talk of a return to the draft, though most analysts say that is unlikely in the near future. But it is not just the military that is facing difficulty in recruiting people to deploy to Iraq. Private contractors are also facing a serious personnel crisis, particularly given the danger of the situation and the fact that kidnappings and beheadings have become a regular part of the reality in occupied Iraq. Now, private U.S. corporations have begun recruiting outside of the country. In recent months companies like Halliburton have launched ad campaigns and recruiting drives in several Latin American countries, promising huge salaries for fighting age men and women to serve in Iraq. Among the countries being targeted are El Salvador, Colombia, and Nicaragua.

--Geoff Thale, senior associate for Central America and Cuba at the Washington Office on Latin America.

AMY GOODMAN: A short while ago, I spoke with Geoff Thale of the Washington office on Latin America and asked him about the corporate recruiting campaigns.

GEOFF THALE: Yeah. I mean there's a lot that's not known about this story, but it's pretty clear that U.S. private security firms, at least two are recruiting in El Salvador, at least one, Halliburton, in Colombia, and in Chile, Blackwater, another one of the well known security firms is recruiting former commandoes there. So, we have people -- they're probably four to five -- 4,000 or 5,000, foreign, non-U.S. private contractors working in Iraq right now, and some significant number of them are Latin American. You know, I think the general sort of context here is that after the war in Vietnam, I think the United States military learned a lesson, and that lesson was that as U.S. casualties increased, support for war declines. And one of the -- one part of the solution to that problem is to recruit people from abroad, particularly people from Latin America, to fill those kind of jobs.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the corporations that are doing this?

GEOFF THALE: Yeah. Halliburton is obviously the best known of them in Colombia. Halliburton, you know, Vice President Cheney is the former head of Halliburton. It's got major contracts throughout Iraq. In Colombia, Halliburton is recruiting people to do -- it's recruiting officers, not just troops but officers to be in charge of guarding security installations, embassies, U.S. and other government buildings, oil pipelines, and so on. In Blackwater, which is the one in Chile, has been in the news recently. It recruits a lot of retired U.S. Special Forces people to work in Iraq, and Triple Canopy, one of the two in El Salvador, is one of the 35 or so companies that recruits and sends people to Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: In a piece -–

GEOFF THALE: All of these –-

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

GEOFF THALE: I should say, Amy, most of them are companies that trade on the New York Stock Exchange. They're private, for-profit businesses.

AMY GOODMAN: In a piece in the Washington Post, it says that military dining facilities in Iraq are typically staffed by workers from poor Asian and African countries?

GEOFF THALE: Right. Fiji, I think they recruited a lot of people from. Nepal is another big place. Former -- you know, the British-trained Gurkha troops in Nepal, a lot of those people have left the service and gone on to be recruited by British corporations to work in Iraq. The Philippines, I think, has also provided a number of people for driving jobs, and military mess hall jobs. I mean, it's sort of -- the overall point here is that in Latin America and elsewhere in third world country, you can make four or five times working as the cook in a mess hall or the security guard for an embassy or the security for truck convoy delivering supplies, you can make four or five times there what you can make in your home country. In Salvador, as a matter of fact, people are quitting military jobs, jobs in the Salvadorean armed forces to line up for and volunteer for the jobs with private security firms, because they will make four or five times what they earn, and on the flip side, the U.S. companies involved in recruiting are going to pay them one-quarter of what they would have to pay if they were recruiting a U.S. citizen to do this work. So there's a market logic. The Pentagon privatizes this work, and saves in the budget. The employer recruits abroad, and improves their bottom line. And people in these countries are earning more than they might earn working domestically. So, if you look on the strictly sort of economic logic, everybody is making money and the free market is at work. If you ask about the morality of this, it's a kind of a frightening thing.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking about -- go ahead, Geoff --

GEOFF THALE: We're paying other people to fight and die for us, is what we're basically doing, and what we're suggesting is that Salvadoreans or Colombians or Nicaraguans or Chileans or Fijians or Filipinos don't matter as much, and the political cost of their fighting and dying for us is far less than the cost of having U.S. citizens do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about soldiers versus those employed by companies. Because what we are talking about now are U.S. corporations going down and recruiting. What is the difference? Has the U.S. military gone down to recruit?

GEOFF THALE: No. The U.S. military has not directly gone down to recruit. It's private security companies that are doing this. They're all under contract from the Pentagon. And they fill a range of jobs from sort of logistics and mess hall jobs through guard duty with security convoys, with embassies, and other things. So, many of these, all of these are jobs that 20 years ago would have been carried out by uniformed U.S. Soldiers. Ten years ago, a significant number of them were being carried out by private U.S. contractors, the mess hall jobs and so on. Now what they're doing is taking things that once were clearly military jobs at one time, like serving as a guard at an embassy or diplomatic facility, and turning them into private jobs. That raises a whole set of questions about who controls these people, what kind of discipline are they subject to, what kind of responsibilities do they have in terms of the -- of ethics, of human rights, the uniformed code of military justice, and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: And of course, the issue of U.S. casualties, which is so significant for the Bush administration, keeping those numbers down, this helps to –

GEOFF THALE: Yeah. That clearly does that. I think that's one of the most -- from the point of view of democracy in the United States, the fact that we can outsource the fighting and outsource some of the deaths, frankly, you know I think that's a scary possibility. When you have -- in a democracy, when you have -- or a country that claims to operate in a democratic fashion, when people fight wars, and there are casualties and deaths, their community, their families and communities feel those casualties and feel the deaths and make political judgments about whether the fighting is worth supporting. And whether the human cost is worth the political costs. When you outsource that, and you have people from other countries doing some of the fighting and some of the dyings, we don't feel those costs, and the U.S. government and the Pentagon can prosecute wars at lower political costs at home, by having people who matter less to us, because they're foreign, do the fighting and dying.

AMY GOODMAN: Geoff Thale is with the Washington office on Latin America. What role do the governments play in this? I mean, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua.

GEOFF THALE: That's a good question. Clearly on one level, they permit the firms to recruit. Probably the more significant thing, though, is that all of these are countries where there's a long history of military action, large militaries that have been involved in civil wars, mostly militaries with long histories of human rights abuses of one sort or another, and militaries that have recently downsized. So what you have is a pool of people with military backgrounds and military training who are very poorly paid and are ripe for the picking, as it were, for U.S. recruiters.

AMY GOODMAN: How much is this known in this country right now, who is being recruited?

GEOFF THALE: It's hardly known at all. I mean, this piece in the Washington Post ten days ago now came really out of the blue, and I think the reporter who covered it was astonished when he discovered the fact, and I don't think there's been any other account of this in the U.S. press. There's an account about Halliburton recruiting in Colombia that's basically a reprint of a Spanish-language Colombian press. There's been mentions of the Chileans, but there's no systematic coverage of any of this, it and it's one of the frightening things about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And then these people, you mentioned Chileans. Who in Chile? For example --

GEOFF THALE: The Chileans are ex-commandoes and most of them were trained under the Pinochet government, a government sort of infamous for its human rights violations, for torture and disappearance and so on. So, it's -- they're recruiting people like that, and with that kind of a background and training for security jobs in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: We hear a lot about military contractors when we're hearing about the torture scandals, for example. It's not just people in the Pentagon and in the intelligence agencies. We often hear about military contractors. Could people be being used as interrogators from Colombia and Nicaragua?

GEOFF THALE: That's an interesting question. Nobody has yet made that allegation, but I think one of the questions to look at is what the Latin Americans who are being recruited are being recruited for, and what are the range of jobs that are being recruited to do. The flip side of that is -- I think you're right, there's significant number of people involved in interrogation of prisoners and involved in the prison scandals in Abu Ghraib and other places who are working for military contractors rather than for the U.S. government. And one of the questions that will be interesting to see is whether those jobs are being outsourced as well, because of the experience and background people there in Latin America have in this kind of a thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Overall, how many people are we talking about?

GEOFF THALE: There's -- like I say, I think the numbers run four to five, maybe four to six thousand foreign contractors working in Iraq. There are probably -- my guess is about 1,000 of them are Latin Americans, and those -- it sounds like the numbers are going up. Several of the recruiting firms, the U.S. contracting firms have said Latin America is a growth area for our industry, because there's so many military people laid off and available to them.

AMY GOODMAN: And how many casualties?

GEOFF THALE: That's -- I don't know is the answer. That's a good question.

AMY GOODMAN: Geoff Thale of the Washington office on Latin America. And this is Democracy Now!

2.

World

Americas

Central America

El Salvador

POOR SALVADORANS CHASE 'THE IRAQI DREAM'
By Kevin Sullivan

** U.S. Security Firms Find Eager Recruits among Former Soldiers, Police Officers **

Washington Post
December 9, 2005
Page A24

SAN SALVADOR -- Juan Nerio, a 44-year-old mason's assistant, was sick of living in a mud hut on the side of a volcano. When he heard that an American company was offering six times his $200 monthly wage, he signed up. Six weeks later he found himself holding an AK-47 assault rifle and guarding a U.S. diplomatic complex in Iraq.

"No one could possibly earn so much in our country," said Nerio, who returned to El Salvador two weeks ago after a hernia forced him to reluctantly give up his $1,240-a-month job in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. "With that kind of money, I thought I could make my family's life a little easier."

Like Nerio, hundreds of Salvadoran men, and even a few women, are jumping at the chance to pursue what the news media here call the "Iraqi Dream." With the U.S. military unable to meet security needs in Iraq, private U.S. firms are now providing thousands of armed guards for diplomatic installations, oil wells, businesses, and contractors there.

These firms are aggressively recruiting in El Salvador, a member of the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq, viewing it as an ideal source of guards. The country has low wages, high unemployment, and a large pool of men with military or police experience -- many of whom were U.S.-trained -- from the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992.

But the heavy recruitment campaign -- through newspaper ads that offer salaries of as much as $3,600 a month -- has raised concerns among human rights officials, who say they believe the companies are exploiting the poor.

"This is the equivalent of a poverty draft," said Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, a rights and policy group, speaking from his office in Washington. "The United States is unwilling to draft people, so they are recruiting people from poor countries to be cannon fodder for us. And if they are killed or injured, there will be no political consequences in the United States."

Beatrice Alamani de Carrillo, El Salvador's independent human rights ombudsman, said the security companies were "playing with the desperation of people who have no other options." She said that if any of the Salvadorans were kidnapped, "our country is not in a position to negotiate their release." She said she was especially concerned about under-trained women going to Iraq.

Many of the Salvadorans, including Nerio, have been recruited by Triple Canopy, a U.S. firm. According to Salvadoran news reports, a group of 30 men and six women hired by the company left for Iraq in late November. Many are former soldiers and special forces members; others have far less training. Nerio served in the Salvadoran army for two years more than 20 years ago.

Several recruits said in interviews that the jobs appealed to them because opportunities to emigrate to the United States had been severely cut back by tightened immigration rules and border controls. More than a million Salvadorans emigrated to the United States during or after the civil war.

Some also said they hoped their service in Iraq would earn them some gratitude from U.S. officials -- perhaps in the form of a work visa when they returned.

"I never thought I had a chance to go to the United States before," said Nerio, a grandfather of six, standing in his tiny home amid groves of mangoes and papayas. "Now they will see that I have experience in Iraq, so this might be my opportunity."

Officials from two U.S.-based security firms working in El Salvador said they never told recruits that service in Iraq would improve their chances of getting a visa. James W. Herman, the U.S. consul general in El Salvador, said service as a private security guard in Iraq was irrelevant to visa applications.

Joe Mayo, a spokesman for Triple Canopy, declined to say exactly how many people the company was sending to Iraq, but he said local news media estimates of about 175 recruits were about right. Mayo said the firm made clear that the jobs were dangerous. He said the company was providing a needed service to the U.S. government and private companies in Iraq.

"It's a free world and a free economy," said Mayo, who spoke from his company's headquarters in Lincolnshire, Ill. "We're not grabbing people and making them go."

Between 3,000 and 6,000 non-Iraqi security guards are currently working in Iraq, according to Doug Brooks of the International Peace Operations Association in Washington, which monitors the private security industry. He said about one-third are former special operations soldiers, mainly from the United States and Britain. The rest are men and women with some military experience recruited from about a dozen countries, especially El Salvador, Fiji, Nepal, Chile, and India.

Brooks said the U.S. and British guards make as much as $700 a day for jobs requiring the highest skills, such as protecting high-profile diplomats and business executives. The others make an average of about $1,200 a month, generally for standing guard at military or civilian sites.

Over the past few weeks, lines of applicants have formed every morning outside George's, a karaoke restaurant next to a fancy shopping mall in San Salvador. They were responding to newspaper ads placed by George Nayor, the restaurant owner, who described himself as a U.S. citizen and the local representative of a Washington-based security company.

Nayor's ads do not name the firm. He also declined to identify it or other company officials, saying they did not want publicity. Despite the lack of details, he said, his cell phone has been ringing so frequently with queries that he barely has had time to brush his teeth.

"This is the future of global security," said Nayor, who has accepted applications from 300 Salvadorans and hopes to sign up at least 1,000 by May. He said the first 12 to 24 would go to Iraq this month, and that his company would soon begin recruiting in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, and other Latin American countries where many people have military experience.

One recent morning, the first group of applicants to arrive at George's included two members of the Salvadoran army's special forces, who spent seven months in Iraq earlier this year as part of a 380-member military unit in the U.S.-led coalition.

"You could sweat your whole life and never make this much money," said Mario Antonio Sanchez, 32, a special forces sergeant who said he earned $280 a month. Sanchez said that if he was accepted, he would quit the army and sign a six-month contract for at least $2,400 a month. "In our country everybody is just trying to survive. We do this because we need to," he said.

Domingo Hector Navarro Lopez, 39, spent 13 years in the Salvadoran military. He said he was tired of trying to get by on his $158-a-month salary as a security guard. After his wartime experience in his own country, he said, he was not frightened by all the violence in Iraq.

"I thank God for this opportunity to go to Iraq," he said, waiting for his interview with Nayor.

Nerio already speaks nostalgically about Iraq. Gazing at a snapshot of himself with fellow Salvadoran guards on the banks of the Euphrates River, he said he wished he were still there.

Back home in his mud-brick hut on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano, with no running water and a single electrical wire keeping a couple of light bulbs burning, he said he had no idea how he would pay for his hernia operation. He would like to go to the United States to work, but said he fears that his best shot at a better life may have been in Iraq.

"That was my only chance," he said.

--Special correspondent Michelle Garcia in New York City contributed to this report.

3.

World

Americas

FIRMS TAP LATIN AMERICANS FOR IRAQ
By Danna Harman

** A history of recent wars makes the region attractive to private companies recruiting for security forces. **

Christian Science Monitor
March 3, 2005

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0303/p06s02-woam.html

SAN SALVADOR -- Last week, El Salvador President Elias Antonio Saca stood at the country's international airport, welcoming home a unit of soldiers returning from service in Iraq. He called them "heroes" and passed on President Bush's personal thanks. School children waiting on the tarmac waved American and Salvadoran flags.

Police Sgt. Roberto Arturo Lopez is heading to Iraq soon, but he expects no such attention -- when he leaves or returns. That's because he, like a growing number of Salvadorans, will play a different sort of role in Iraq: that of a hired U.S. hand.

El Salvador, the only Latin American country to maintain troops in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, has 338 soldiers on the ground. But there are about twice as many more Salvadorans there working for private contracting companies, doing everything from the dishes and the driving to guarding oil installations, embassies, and senior personnel.

Private security firms contracted with the Pentagon and the State Department are dipping into experienced pools of trained fighters throughout Central and South America for their new recruits. With better pay than what they can earn at home, some 1,000 Latin Americans are working in Iraq today, estimates the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). These recruits are joined by thousands of others -- from the U.S. and Britain, as well as from Fiji, the Philippines, India, and beyond. Close to 20,000 armed personnel employed by private contractors are estimated to be operating in Iraq, making up the second largest foreign armed force in the country, after the U.S.

"It's not illegal -- but it's not celebrated either," says Jorge Giammattei, a political adviser at El Salvador's Interior Ministry, giving voice to the moral ambivalence felt here and elsewhere toward the growing reliance on private citizens to fill roles once held by the U.S. military.

Sergeant Lopez is a shooting instructor at the police academy outside San Salvador. He has been with the police 11 years, and as a senior instructor makes $540 a month, on which he supports his wife, ex-wife, and three young daughters.

He was first approached by a friend six months ago, he says. The friend gave him a cellphone number to call and told him he could make $1,500 a month working as a guard in Iraq. He was tempted, he says, but unsure. He had, over the years, earned respect, if not money, at the academy. And while he had always toyed with idea of traveling to the U.S. to find higher-paying work, going to Iraq had never occurred to him.

"That part of the world had nothing to do with me," he says. A few months later, a different security firm got in touch, he says, this time offering $3,200 a month. He then gave it serious thought.

"I know the contracting companies are having no problem finding recruits," says Dan Broidy, author of The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, who estimates that there is more than one contract worker for every 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq today.

Throughout Latin America there have been numerous press reports of contracting and subcontracting firms recruiting in Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Each of the countries has had recent -- and in Colombia's case, ongoing -- wars, which make for large pools of experienced military and police.

Joe Mayo, a spokesman for Triple Canopy, a security company based in Lincolnshire, Ill., confirmed that the firm is recruiting in El Salvador but declined to give any detailed information. "Everything we do is legal," he stressed in a phone interview, "but we are a private company. The minute you divulge your numbers of employees and your methods of recruiting, you become less competitive."

But a police sergeant here, speaking on condition of anonymity, says there have been more than 800 requests in the past three months by policemen nationwide asking to leave in order to accept jobs with two different contracting firms, mostly with Triple Canopy. He says 32 people have been given permission by the department and maybe 10 more, he says, have gone without permission.

Pay depends on the recruit's experience and the job to be performed, but can also be determined by his country of origin. While some firms offer U.S. and European recruits up to $700 a day, companies like Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., reportedly pay Latin Americans and others from less developed countries $1,200 to $5,000 a month. Uniforms, housing, transportation, food, and life insurance are all provided. Typical police salaries in El Salvador range from $320 a month for rank-and-file police to $1,500 for a handful of elite officers.

The practice has its critics. "This is all very deeply wrong," says Geoff Thale, a senior associate for Central America at the left-leaning WOLA. He argues that the developing world should not serve as a cheap labor source for life-threatening work that the U.S. government has chosen to undertake. "It may be tempting to hire low-wage workers to take risks for us, so that we don't experience the human cost of casualties or deaths ourselves. But it's not morally acceptable," he says.

Others, like Paul Forage, a lecturer on military and security issues at Florida Atlantic University, wonder whose law the contracted recruits operate under, what sort of accountability mechanisms are in place, and who would help them if they were kidnapped? "There are a lot of vague areas here," says Forage.

While Pentagon and State Department guidelines governing the operation of contractors in Iraq are loose, Doug Brooks of the International Peace Operations Association, a group of private-sector service companies engaged in overseas operations, says the industry is becoming more regulated, both by itself and the U.S. government.

Firms, for example, are required to obtain standard insurance for all their recruits, and more companies are committed to assisting their workers in cases in injury or kidnapping.

"There used to be more irregularities," he admits, "but the bad [contracting firms] have been weeded out."

Lopez's best friend at the academy, Max Vaquerano, is already in Iraq, in Basra. The two men communicate weekly by e-mail, and Lopez says he now has good sense of what to expect in Iraq -- it's hot and, despite most news accounts, is often boring.

Lopez has already had an interview with a contracting company, which he refuses to name, and has asked for leave from his current duties. Even if he doesn't get it, he says, he will be leaving next month.

"It's time to go to war," he says, smiling. "It's a good opportunity."

--Ms. Harman is Latin America bureau chief for the Monitor and USA Today.