With regular US ground forces dangerously strained, the Bush Administration and Defense Department keep trying to find “creative” solutions to the manpower crisis. A little-noticed new aspect of the “legionaries, auxiliaries, and mercenaries” strategy is the influx of veterans of Latin American militaries and paramilitaries to private firms handling "security" duties in Iraq.
This new development poses plenty of problems, but not because Latin American militaries are inherently less capable of fighting guerrillas than American troops. Not only would it be culturally condescending to assume that every soldier from Latin America is worse than any given soldier from the US military, but many of these veterans have more experience at counterinsurgency than their US brethren. Recent insurgencies in Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala make it more likely that Latin Americans can teach North Americans more about many aspects of counterinsurgency than the reverse.
It’s also a mistake to assume that every Latin American veteran is guilty of atrocities. Many units of the Colombian military, for example, have a good record human rights record in the war against the FARC and ELN guerrillas. Membership in a paramilitary isn’t necessarily an automatic indicator of human rights abuses.
The real problems with this influx of Latin Americans into the mercenary companies arise in the management of the war. Even the best of these Latin Americans will have far less to offer than they should, thanks to these structural defects in the US campaign.
First, there is the obvious language issue. The new Latin American mercenaries do not speak Arabic, so they can’t do any better job of gathering intelligence, patrolling neighborhoods, and dealing with risky situations the troops and “contractors” already there. The language problem between the Spanish-speaking mercenaries and American personnel complicates any tactical coordination between them.
The language issue makes it even harder to discern what the mercenary companies are doing in Iraq, when that sort of opacity has created enough problems already. New manageability and accountability hurdles—for example, will after action reports be translated from Spanish into English for US officials to review?—are the last thing this already troubled war effort needs.
And, of course, there is the human rights question. Some Latin American veterans will have been involved in atrocities. However, the delicate phrasing of that last sentence already shows how difficult it will be to separate the killers from the soldiers. American taxpayers have to trust that mercenary companies will (1) get access to judicial and military records from several Latin American countries, (2) be able to read them, (3) be able to identify potential employees from these records, (4) be able to determine whether a given soldier was a bystander or enthusiastic participant in corruption, torture, or murder. It’s hard to believe that the mercenary companies will get through these most basic steps.
Of course, the biggest question mark over this whole enterprise is the manpower crisis. With the obvious pressures to deliver personnel quickly to Iraq, how likely are the mercenary companies to be as meticulous as they need be? Forget the human rights issues—will there be effective checks into the applicants’ military resumes? Will we know that someone was really a seasoned guerrilla-fighter, or someone who worked in a supply depot?
The Miami Herald’s headline for this story, “Latin American hired guns shrug off Iraq War risks for payday,” misses the point. The problem isn’t the “hired guns,” but the people who hire them.
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