A Year in Hell for 1,000 Dollars a Month

And you thought Blackwater was scum.Make no mistake, it is, but it's not even close to the scummiest.
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original-ips

PERU-IRAQ: A Year in Hell for 1,000 Dollars a Month

By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Nov 6 (IPS) - Former Peruvian noncommissioned army officer Norman Alfonso Solano is happy because he has once again been recruited to work as a private security guard in one of the most dangerous places in the world: Iraq.

Although he saw fellow security guards killed by the Iraqi resistance when he was working in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, Solano clenched his teeth and told himself, "I need the money." This time he is heading to Baghdad.

The robust 46-year-old 1.80-metre tall Solano forms part of a new contingent of former members of the Peruvian armed forces and police who will guard U.S. installations in Iraq for a year in exchange for a hefty paycheck, by Peruvian standards: 1,000 dollars a month.

"I earn 200 dollars a month here, and that’s when I manage to find work," said Solano, a veteran of the 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war against the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

"I have four kids. I'm an expert in weapons and am trained for war. That's why I have to go where there is war," he told IPS.

The U.S. private military company Triple Canopy, which has drawn criticism for taking advantage of the high unemployment and low wages in Peru to recruit workers, has been hiring former members of Peru’s security forces to work in Iraq for the past several years. It also hires workers from Chile, Colombia and El Salvador.

The firm was founded in 2003 by former members of the U.S. army's elite Delta Force. Thanks to contacts in the George W. Bush administration, it quickly won lucrative contracts with the State Department.

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complete article here

They pay the starving merc $12,000 for the year, while the pentagon pays the company $250,000+ for the merc's service.

Exploitation, fraud and cronyism at its best.

I hope the people running these "U.S. private military" companies rot in hell.

they're billing the DOD for. I'm happy that at least he got a new house for his efforts.

But not in Bushco's 'Merka.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

-- Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, War is a racket. (1935)

"A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war."