Whack-a-mole: U.S. Private Sector Providing Drug-War Mercenaries to Mexico

U.S. Private Sector Providing Drug-War Mercenaries to Mexico | | the narcosphere: "L-3 MPRI, a division of a major U.S. defense contractor, is hunting in the mercenary community to hire “site leads” who can help oversee the company’s personnel in Mexico and also coordinate “with Mexican Army officials” at a dozen training sites, called “VMTCs,” located in Mexico.

Those VMTCs, or Virtual Military Training Centers, provide “high quality training and simulation support,” and the site leads being sought will report directly to the L-3 MPRI’s project manager (or PM) in Mexico City, a job advertisement posted on a L-3 MPRI Web page states.

Critics of U.S. drug war policy have long maintained that the militarism it encourages is, in large part, profit-motivated, with the $1.5 billion Mérida Initiative being held out as evidence of the mercenary nature of the policy. Under the initiative, the U.S. has agreed to provide the Mexican government with sophisticated military equipment and training to help advance its “fight” against “organized crime and associated violence,” according to the U.S. State Department.

Although it is not clear, at this point, who is funding L-3 MPRI’s training centers in Mexico — whether they are being supported by Mérida money or the Mexican government, or via some other program — what is clear is that the help-wanted advertisement represents important evidence that U.S. private-sector companies have mercenary operations inside Mexico that appear to be providing high-level training to the Mexican military in support, at least in part, of that nation’s prosecution of the drug war. "