Outsourcing the Iraq War: Mercenary Recruiters Turn to Latin America

[babylonsister]

Outsourcing the Iraq War: Mercenary Recruiters Turn to Latin America
by Eric Stoner


In October, Erik Prince, the 39-year-old CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, a leading private security company operating in Iraq, went into damage-control mode. Blackwater employees in Baghdad’s Nisour Square had killed 17 Iraqi civilians the previous month, causing an uproar and the suspension of official diplomatic convoys throughout the country for four days. Making the rounds with the media and testifying before Congress, Prince repeatedly said that his employees are not mercenaries, as critics contend. Citing the definition of a mercenary as “a professional soldier working for a foreign government,” Prince told the House Oversight Committee that in contrast, Blackwater’s employees are “Americans working for America, protecting Americans.”

This statement would come as a surprise-and a slap in the face-to the thousands of Latin Americans and others from outside the United States whom the company has hired to fill its contracts in Iraq since the war began. Greystone Limited, a Blackwater affiliate set up in 2004 in the tax haven of Barbados, has recruited Iraq security guards from countries throughout Latin America, including Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama, as journalist Jeremy Scahill has reported.

But Blackwater is far from the only such company hiring “third-country nationals,” or employees who are not from the United States or Iraq. In the interest of improving profit margins, private military firms in Iraq are increasingly turning to the developing world for armed guards. Peter Singer, a leading expert on the private security industry at the Brookings Institution, has estimated that there are citizens from 30 countries employed as security contractors in Iraq. While ex-soldiers from the Balkans, Fiji, Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uganda are all common in Iraq, Latin America has proven to be a particularly fertile recruiting ground for these companies.

Latin America, says Adam Isacson, director of programs at the Center for International Policy, is a predictable site for U.S. mercenary companies to recruit personnel. In “what other region of the world are you going to find reasonably westernized people with military experience, in some cases with combat experience, who will work for low wages, who speak a language that a lot of our own military personnel speak,” he asks, noting that the U.S. Army is about a quarter Latino and that Latin America accounts for about 40% of U.S. military training programs worldwide. “It’s their natural ground to find people with military experience for whom $1,000 a month is a lot of money.”

One of the first people to recognize the role that Latin America could play in the booming new mercenary industry was José Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, a former arms broker. Indeed, it was Pizarro who “opened the door” for these firms to recruit in the region, as José Luis Gómez del Prado, head of the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, told Mother Jones magazine. A dual citizen of Chile and the United States, Pizarro served in the militaries of both countries and to this day defends the Pinochet dictatorship. After leaving the Marines as a translator for the U.S. Southern Command in 1999, Pizarro decided to cash in on his unique connections and began facilitating arms deals between Latin American militaries and U.S. manufacturers. Shortly after the United States invaded Iraq, he set his eyes on a new lucrative business opportunity: the provision of Chileans to mercenary companies.

In October 2003, Pizarro traveled to Blackwater’s headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, to pitch the idea. Prince was receptive during their meeting and gave him the go-ahead. Pizarro returned immediately to Chile and placed a discreet ad in El Mercurio, the Santiago daily, looking for former military officers for “work abroad.” More than 1,000 applicants quickly responded, and by February 2004, Blackwater’s first batch of Chilean commandos, 77 of them, was on its way to Iraq. Offering the unusually high salary of about $3,000 per month, Blackwater began hiring a steady stream of Pizarro’s men for the “static protection” of State Department and Coalition Provisional Authority buildings. The Chileans were still a relative bargain, considering that former U.S. or British special forces can be paid as much as $1,000 per day in Iraq, according to The New York Times.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/14/10347/

[madeline_con]

1. I think the "foreign government" mentioned in the definition

means foreign to the place they work (Iraq). So, yes, they ARE mercenaries!

[Joanne98]

2. I heard there's alot of right-wing killers in Bolivia!

They're racists too. should be perfect for the job!

:sarcasm: