The globalization of war

Today, while waiting at Charlie's Chicken for a chicken sandwich and side order of tajadas, a friendly middle-aged gentleman approached my co-volunteer, Josh, and me and greeted us in labored English: ¨Hello. How are you?¨ It isn't uncommon for a Honduran to approach gringos for a rare chance to practice what English they know.

Anyway, this led into a conversation about how he learned English. Apparently he worked in security at the US Embassy in Baghdad a year ago and was one of the many guards responsible for securing the premises in the Green Zone. His salary was high -- about nine year's worth of work in one -- but it was dangerous and thankless. Josh said he has heard that the job did not include insurance.

This man was not the only Honduran sent to Iraq for security work. According to this article there is a contingent of at least 600 Hondurans who were essentially outsourced as private security for American interests in Baghdad. They were to be paid between $900 and $1,500 a month for a six-month tour in Iraq. In this report, the salary promised that was promised to a Chilean mercenary was not what he received, but the worker did not see the contract until he was on the plane for Baghdad.

Incidentally, this chilling line from the first report was also eerily similar to a comment the man at Charlie's Chicken had made: ¨The instructors 'explained to us that where we were going everyone would be our enemy, and we'd have to look at them that way, because they would want to kill us, and the gringos too,' an unidentified trainee told the AFP wire service. 'So we'd have to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even it was a child.'

As is generally the case with globalization, the Honduran security workers were not compensated as well as their US counterparts. According to yet another article, which talks mostly about Colombians used as private security personnel, the Latin American mercenaries were paid half of what their American counterparts received. In the report quoted above, the American secuirty personnel received more than 10 times what the Chileans did.

What does this say about how we value a person from a developing country compared to a person from a developed country? They are both doing the same work in the same dangerous situation, but the Honduran mercenary is essentially viewed as less valuable. Yes, $1,500 a month is significantly more than the Honduran worker would make here in Honduras, but to me the salary in this line of work is essentially the value of someone's life.

The reality is globalization allows us to outsource all of our dirty work to cheap labor -- t-shirts, car parts, and killing.