Latin American hired guns shrug off Iraq War risks for payday

[Judi Lynn]

Source: MiamiHerald

Latin American hired guns shrug off Iraq War risks for payday
Thousands of Latin Americans have gone to Iraq to work for U.S.-based security companies.
Posted on Wed, Aug. 01, 2007
BY TYLER BRIDGES
[e-mail]



LIMA -- Tired of subsisting by selling cigarettes on the street, Gregorio Calixto jumped at the chance last fall to earn $1,000 a month working for a U.S.-based security company in Iraq.
(snip)

The Latin Americans typically served in the military back home -- many fought leftist guerrillas in places like El Salvador and Colombia -- and were taught by U.S. instructors, making it easier for them to use U.S. weapons and work under American security procedures.

But after leaving their armed forces, these soldiers found themselves in low-paying jobs. So they agreed to risk injury or death in Iraq for $1,000 to $1,500 a month -- $5 to $7 an hour -- a good wage for them, but far below the $10,000 to $15,000 monthly pay for American contract employees.

Peruvians guard the outer perimeter of a U.S. installation in Basra. Chileans protect the governmental Green Zone in Baghdad. Hondurans have provided security within the terminal at Baghdad International Airport. Salvadorans once protected the Green Zone in Baghdad, but they and some Ecuadoreans reportedly have left the jobs after media in their home countries labeled them ``mercenaries.''



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/188787.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Kick!

:kick: :kick: :kick:

[gratuitous]

2. Paid a whole thousand bucks a month, are they?

I wonder what we the people are billed for their services? I'm guessing somewhere above a thousand dollars a month.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Apparently they are US-trained death squad veterans, needing money,

and by going to Iraq, filling out the roles for _Bush, helping to beef up his assault on Iraqis, they are able to scoop up 1,000 per month, while run-of-the-mill contractors from the U.S. make at least 10,000 per month, starting.

El Salvador's president finally bent to public pressure recently and removed the few soldiers _Bush had pressured him to send originally.

Latin Americans and recently Central Americans, massively with Reagan, have been ordered to slaughter hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, told they were "communists," and having the fires fanned by idiot American right-wing lunatics in our own Senate and House, people like Jesse Helms, who was possibly their #1 "anti-Communist" (racist) fanatic, and in the culture by drooling idiots like Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, who publicly supported death squad dealing Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt, even sending them financial backing they gathered from their American congregations.

Their extreme poverty, insured by continuing exploitation by American-based multi-national operations, drives a lot of these people into jobs they otherwise would probably never take up. They have even been used by Cuban American "exile" terrorists to carry bombs to Cuba and place them in hotels, restaurants, discos.