Swap a miserable salary for a less miserable salary

Photo accompanying story
Insight Crime has translated Nelson Rauda Zablah's Los soldados, hartos, incumplen la orden de guardar silencio into El Salvador's Military Wants Compensation for Security Risks.
The common soldiers are people who live in poverty. Out of habit, but more than anything out of survival, they knock on the doors of headquarters to enlist.  A soldier who left his work as a maize farmer to join the military told me, “I like it because my father was in the military. The pattern in the family was to become a soldier.  Besides, economic need obligates one to do it, that’s why one bears it. Working in the fields is insecure and you earn less than $110, more or less. Tell me what you would do, earning a monthly salary like this?” he asks. A patrol soldier makes double what one can make working the fields: swap a miserable salary for a less miserable salary.
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