EL SALVADOR SENDS MORE TROOPS TO IRAQ AMID PUBLIC DISAPPROVAL.

With a good deal of fanfare and against public sentiment, El Salvador's President Antonio Saca sent off another 380 of his nation's soldiers to fight the US's war in Iraq. On Jan. 29, he stood before his soldiers at the Brigada de Artilleria in San Juan Opico and told them, "We identify ourselves

Saca continued on to say that he and the country also identify with the war on terror, struggling to make the case that El Salvador, too, suffered terrorism in its own civil war (1980-1992). "It is a delicate job, it is a difficult job, it risks lives, but it is the only way to defend freedom," he said.

El Salvador is the lone Latin American country sending troops to Iraq and has been doing so in rotating contingents since August 2003. This will be the eighth such deployment. In the beginning, the Salvadorans were joined by similar contingents from Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, but those countries eventually thought better of the adventure and pulled out (see NotiCen, 2004-03-18). Guatemala was about to send troops, too, but never did, presumably because President Oscar Berger got a thumbs-down from his own Army, which he is loath to cross.

This most recent deployment found Saca denying accusations that he was sending soldiers in return for favorable treatment from the US on Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for the thousands of Salvadorans now living and working in the US. A total of 250,000 of them are said to benefit from TPS, and the country is dependent on the money they, and perhaps millions more, send home in remittances. Saca has denied the charge, saying, "Before sending the Cuscatlan battalions to Iraqi soil, we already had TPS, one thing has nothing to do with the other." It is also true, however, that the current TPS agreement expires in September 2007.

A first wave of 87 of the total 380 left for Iraq Jan. 30, on an aircraft provided by the US-led coalition. Minister of Defense Otto Romero said they were headed for Camp Delta in the city of Al Kut, 60 km southeast of Baghdad, where the 379 soldiers of the seventh contingent, which is rotating home, is billeted.