Dammit! We are NOT a war zone!

A few cohetes are going off (to the delight of my 3-year old neighbor Tristan) in a post-fourth of July frenzy, but thank you very much, we are not taking up arms against a sea of “insurgents” down this way.

A sombrero-tip to “Couldbetrue” at South Texas Chisme for finding Jeremy Roebuck’s article in the McAllen Monitor:

The U.S. Border Patrol could dramatically increase its presence on the nation’s southern frontier by adding hundreds of private contractors to its ranks, according to a proposal presented to Congress last month.

DynCorp International, a Virginia-based military security firm, said it could train and deploy 1,000 private agents to the U.S.-Mexico border within 13 months, offering a quick surge of law enforcement officers to a region struggling to clamp down on illegal immigration.

Currently, the company manages an army of private security agents deployed across the world in support of U.S. missions, including several former Border Patrol agents hired to help secure the Iraqi border.

While of course there are problems along the border, the “Statement of Robert B. Rosenkranz President, Government Services Division, DynCorp International before the Subcommittee on Management, Investigation, and Oversight Committee on Homeland Security House of Representatives Hearing on ‘Increasing the Number of U.S. Border Patrol Agents’ (June 19, 2007)” — pdf file here — says that his company’s border control experience is of a different sort than what is normal between two countries with close diplomatic, economic and social ties:

We currently have approximately 14,000 employees, more than $2 billion in annual sales, and employees deployed in some 35 countries. Some 4,000 personnel support our contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan and 142 have paid the ultimate sacrifice, including 23 Americans. We have broad and deep experience in our core competencies of law enforcement services, contingency support, logistics, base operations, field construction, aircraft and ground equipment maintenance, maritime services, and program management. We also support the government’s counter-drug efforts in Latin America and South Asia and provide selected security services to customers in various locations around the world.

…

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Liberia, and Iraq, we have built and operated forward operating bases, military bases, training camps, and police facilities. Should these types of facilities be necessary to sustain forces in remote areas along the U.S. border, DynCorp International can build them, maintain them, and provide personnel to work from them.

In other words, the company is selling their experience in unfriendly countries — and war zones — IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Local policing here is done by the Brewster County Sheriff’s Department, the Alpine Police Department, the National Park Service rangers and the Border Patrol. While the latter are arguably a paramilitary outfit (and DynCorp also wants to subcontract our tax-payer trained agents to work in Iraq!!) all these are civilian police forces — what are usually called “Peace Officers”. Yeah, a few of them are jerks and throw their weight around, but more than a few of these guys carry an extra lunch with them to share with any “illegal” they have to turn in. And, they won’t admit it, but I’ve know a few who look the other way. If we’ve got hard-asses, they’re more the Joe Friday type than Rambo.

Our locals probably have less training than other police agents around Texas, but that’s more a matter of low salaries and the difficulty of recruiting officers to live in a rural area (if there’s a retired State Trooper or Border Patrol agent who likes horses and hunting… the Sheriff may have a deal for you! If you are were tops in your class at the Police Academy and have a MA in sociology, I don’t think we can afford you). Still, they are trained as civilian officers… and usually learn (or are native speakers of) Spanish. Most are locals who want to stay in the area. Even the new Border Patrol agents receive 10 months of training, and some immersion in border culture before coming here. Robert Rozencrantz trains his guys too:

Before deploying overseas on a training mission, our police officers typically undergo three weeks of training and orientation. … Obviously, this would also ensure a faster augmentation of the Border Patrol and—perhaps most importantly—provide a level of professional experience that may not be available when recruiting from the general population.
Half of the 10 months of current Border Patrol training is on-the-job and in-service training, and might be waived or reduced if prior law enforcement experience is accepted. Similarly, some of the academy training might be redundant, or perhaps could be revised to gain greater efficiencies.

What exactly is “redundant” about the training? And who is being trained. While the only news source I can find about this is from 2005 article on the World Socialist Web Site, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has been very concerned about companies, including DynCorp, hiring Peruvian (and other) mercenaries for duty in Iraq. I don’t see where DynCorp. is proposing to train people on the local culture… or where these rent-an-agents would have any ties to the local community.

Lower-paid rent-an-agents in an unfamiliar place with no local ties should worry even the die-hard “close the border” folks. Besides our real concerns about the inevitable growth of police corruption with more and more policing along the border there’s a model for what we can expect in Los Zetas.

I can’t find many reliable links about them, the Wikipedia.org piece at noting that they don’t have sufficient information, and most links being a few years old. I don’t buy the story that Los Zetas are an army of rouge Mexican special forces soldiers (there aren’t more than about 200 special forces soldiers in the entire Mexican military), but the hired killers do include guys with military and police training who’ve gone over to the dark side.

What will keep mercenaries (especially if they are from a third country) from going to work for the narcotics traffickers in the U.S. who have a heck of a lot more access to weapons and money than their counterparts in Mexico? What loyalty to … well anything, let alone the Constitution of the United States do mercenaries have?

I wish this was just some bad political idea that was killed off when “cooler heads prevail”… but I’m very concerned that this is already in the works, and the financial benefits to the company (and politicians?) are making this a likely prospect. War is the health of the state, as Benito Mussolini put it. I wish they’d remember what his namesake, Benito Juarez said: “Peace is respect for the rights of others.” Like those of us who live here.

Nancy Conroy caught on to another “rent-an-army” — Blackwater — operating on the border. CorpWatch has several links to news about what they call “world’s premier rent-a-cop business”.