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The Instituto de Marina Mercante Ocupacional de Panama, whose young students are being recruited for the Americans’ war. Photo by Eric Jackson

Panamanians recruited for Iraq

by Eric Jackson, mostly from other media

In “advertorials” disguised as news on the pro-PRD RPC television network, and appeals made through an activists with a San Miguelito unemployed group, and reportedly through a maritime high school in Balboa an undisclosed private corporation is hiring Panamanians to work in support jobs for the US Navy in Iraq. Truck drivers, sailors, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, electrical engineers, butchers, bakers, nurses and others are being offered wages of between $800 and $1,500 per month to work in Iraq at jobs of the sort that military quartermaster, combat support and medical units used to perform for the American military. The pay being offered is between two and six times that which such workers make in Panama, where unemployment has been in double digits for decades.

Panama, whose official foreign policy is one of neutrality --- so as not to give belligerent force a motive to attack the Panama Canal --- has since the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 lent the Americans assistance in such things as investigations of financial moves by Muslim militants, but has not participated in or lent diplomatic support to the US-led war in Iraq. The only official Panamanian response to the recruitment here of people to go to Iraq has been a warning by Labor Minister Reynaldo Rivera that employment in the war zone is hazardous.

On July 20 Anel Garcia, an activist with the San Miguelito Unemployed Movement (MODESAM) held a recruiting meeting at the San Miguel Arcangel Hospital, a facility run by a semi-autonomous foundation controlled by the Ministry of Health, and later told La Prensa that he had received more than 400 inquiries from people considering the offers. That newspaper also reported that the Instituto de Marina Mercante Ocupacional de Panama, a maritime high school that operates at the building that used to house St. Mary’s school in Balboa, is also participating in the Iraq recruiting.

The US military has for some years been shifting many jobs that were once performed by uniformed military personnel to civilian contractors. Such contractors are mainly in non-combat roles, but they also include mercenaries in the traditional sense of the word. These days recruiting for the US Armed Forces is down, and since the 2003 invasion of Iraq more than 5,000 American service men and women have been charged with desertion or lesser offenses for refusing orders to go to Iraq. Although a few members of Congress have suggested the possible need for a military draft, the conventional wisdom is that such a move would be a political impossibility given the widespread unpopularity of the Iraq War.

Among the companies recruiting Latin Americans for the Iraq War are Halliburton, Triple Canopy, Blackwater and others. American military mess halls in Iraq are mostly staffed by workers recruited from Asian countries.

Civilian workers from countries not formally at war have occasionally been the targets of attacks by Iraqi insurgents, but the casualty statistics for such people have never been published by the US government. Pentagon contracts typically prohibit the companies that recruit and hire workers for military support activities or mercenary work from saying anything to the press.