Pentagon Recruiting Latinos for the Front Lines

Pentagon targets Latinos and Mexicans to man
the front lines in war on terror

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by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

The Independent

10 September 2003

With the casualty rate in Iraq growing by the day and
President George Bush’s worldwide "war on terrorism"
showing no signs of abating, a stretched United States
military is turning increasingly to Latinos -
including tens of thousands of non-citizen immigrants
– to do the fighting and dying on its behalf.
Senior Pentagon officials have identified Latinos as
by far the most promising ethnic group for recruitment,
because their numbers are growing rapidly in the US
and they include a plentiful supply of low-income men
of military age with few other job or educational
prospects.

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 Latino, are currently
enlisted. Recruiters have even crossed the border into
Mexico - to the fury of the Mexican authorities - to
look for school-leavers who may have US residency
papers.

The aim, according to Pentagon officials, is to boost
the Latino numbers in the military from roughly 10 per
cent to as much as 22 per cent. 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.

But while officials praise the willingness of Mexican
Americans and other Latinos, 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.
Rick Jahnkow, of the Committee Opposed to Militarism
and the Draft, said: "They are vulnerable economically.
That’s why they are targeting them. [These people are]
going to provide them with the means to carry out
future wars."

Recent statistics from the Pew Hispanic Centre, a
non-partisan 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 per cent of enlisted men in 2001, compared with
13.4 per cent of the general population - they are
over-represented in jobs that involve handling weapons
(17.7 per cent).

In Iraq, the first US casualty was a Latino non-
citizen, a Guatemalan orphan raised in Los Angeles
called Jose Gutierrez. Although a precise breakdown of
ethnic numbers is not available, the Pentagon’s list
of dead and wounded has included dozens of Spanish
names. At least 10 out of almost 300 dead have been
non-citizens.

An ethnic group has never before been the target of
such a recruitment drive.
In the Vietnam war, when the US military was still
conscripting soldiers for compulsory service, 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,
and more likely to find themselves in the front lines.
Now the military operates what Mr 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 the
poorer parts of the country, army recruiters talk to
children as early as primary school.

At a
predominantly Latino high school in east Los Angeles,
students became so exasperated by the presence of army
recruiters at careers fairs that they began a campaign
to get rid of them with the slogan "students not
soldiers".
Such activities are apparently common even across the
border. A recruiter in San Diego told an Army radio
show: "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." A 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.