LOS ANGELES, 10 September 2003 — With the casualty rate in Iraq growing by the day and President Bush’s worldwide “war on terrorism” showing no signs of abating, a stretched United States military is turning increasingly to Latin Americans — including tens of thousands of non-citizen immigrants — to do the fighting and dying on its behalf.
Senior Pentagon officials have identified Latin Americans, known in the United States as Latinos, as by far the most promising ethnic group for recruitment, because their numbers are growing rapidly and they include a plentiful supply of low-income military-age men with few other job or educational prospects.
The recruitment efforts have also extended to non-citizens, who have been told by the Bush administration that they can apply for citizenship the day they join up, rather than waiting the standard five years after receiving their green card. More than 37,000 non-citizens, almost all of them Latino, are currently enlisted. Recruiters have even popped across the border into Mexico — to the fury of the Mexican authorities — to look for likely school-leavers who happen to have US residency papers.
The aim, according to Pentagon officials, is to boost the Latino numbers in the military from roughly 10 percent to as much as 22 percent. That was the figure cited recently by John McLaurin, a deputy assistant secretary of the army, as the size of the “Hispanic... recruiting market”, and it has also been bandied about in the pages of the Army Times.
While officials praise the willingness of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, however, the strategy has been denounced by anti-war groups as a cynical exploitation of impoverished young men who are lined up to be little more than cannon fodder. “They are vulnerable economically. That’s why they are targeting them. That is who is going to provide them with the means to carry out future wars,” said Rick Jahnkow of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft. Recent statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan think tank, show that Latinos are already doing the most dangerous combat jobs in disproportionate numbers. While they are still under-represented in the Armed Forces as a whole — they made up 9.4 percent of enlisted men in 2001, compared with 13.4 percent of the general population — they are overrepresented in jobs that involve handling weapons (17.7 percent).
In Iraq, the very first US casualty was a Latino non-citizen, a Guatemalan orphan raised in Los Angeles called Jose Gutierrez. Although precise ethnic breakdowns are not available, the Pentagon’s list of dead and wounded has included dozens of Spanish names. At least 10 of the almost 300 dead so far have been non-citizens.
It is unprecedented for an ethnic group to be targeted for recruitment in this way. In the Vietnam War, when the US military still used the draft, the de facto characteristic of the men who did the fighting and dying was class. Poor people — whether black, white or Mexican — were much more likely to be drafted in the first place, and more likely to find themselves in the front lines.
Now the military operates what Jahnkow calls a “poverty draft” — selling itself as an attractive career option or stepping stone to further education in communities that have few other options. In poorer parts of the country, army recruiters talk to children as early as elementary school. At one predominantly Latino high school in East Los Angeles, students became so exasperated by their presence at careers fairs they launched a campaign to get rid of them with the slogan “students not soldiers”.
Such activities are apparently common even across the border. “It’s more or less common practice that some recruiters go to Tijuana to distribute pamphlets, or in some cases they look for someone to help distribute the information on the Mexican side,” one San Diego-based recruiter told an army radio show. One recruiter who visited a technical high school in Tijuana in May triggered a diplomatic incident after the headmaster threw him out and the Mexican government protested vehemently to Washington. The army subsequently sought to deny that this was standard practice.
