Private Soldiers on Latin America: operations and recruitment

Abstract

Neoliberalism brought with it trends of rationalization of business activities, typically post-Fordist, manifested in the Defense sector, known as military outsourcing, in which the search for private military and security companies to support military operations was consolidated in the western world in the reorganization of state military apparatus. The purpose of this article is to analyze the impact of this military outsourcing in Latin and Central America, where companies in the sector have taken root since the 1990s and to this day find diverse job opportunities, in addition to a local labor base. The article has three main sections. First, it presents the conditions that drove the strategic reconfiguration of the military apparatus with this kind of outsourcing of the activities of national armed forces. The second section comments on these corporate agents in the international security scenario. The third section is dedicated to highlighting the aspects that enabled the proliferation of these companies in Latin and Central America, describing the main activities carried out on the continent in the 2000s, using, for this purpose, documents from the UN organization responsible for monitoring companies in the sector.