Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

WHILE THE Bush administration struggled and failed to build a “Coalition of the Willing” among nations for its invasion and occupation of Iraq, the private military firms Washington hired to support its Iraq operation recruited aggressively around the globe—often in nations whose military and security forces had horrible human rights records and reputations. Along with the workers from across the developing world—many of whose home countries strongly opposed the war—hired by Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and other “reconstruction” megafirms, the mercenary companies in Iraq largely made up the “international” or multilateral nature of the occupation. The United States may not have been able to convince many governments to deploy forces in Iraq, but it certainly could entice their citizens with promises of significantly higher wages than they could earn at home. Unlike some other private military firms operating in Iraq—which contracted cheap Iraqi labor to staff security projects—Blackwater was viewed as an elite security company because of its high-profile contract guarding the top U.S. officials and several regional occupation headquarters. But while Blackwater encouraged this view, in both Baghdad and in Washington, of a highly professional all-American company patriotically supporting its nation at war, it quietly began bringing in mercenaries from shady quarters to staff its ever-growing security contracts in Iraq.

U.S. training of foreign forces to support covert operations and overtly repressive policies is hardly a new development, particularly in Latin America. Over its six decades of existence, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) trained more than sixty thousand Latin American soldiers “in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence, and interrogation tactics.”¹ According to Amnesty International, the SOA was “notorious for training and educating Latin American military personnel who went on to commit human rights violations in their own countries…. The SOA used manuals that advocated torture, extortion, kidnapping and execution.”² Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the United States also fueled “dirty wars” by covertly arming, funding, and training death squads or repressive militaries to crush popular movements Washington deemed a threat to its interests. The Iraq occupation saw a greatly expanded use and training of foreign forces by the private sector. Latin American countries that had been victims of U.S.-sponsored death squads and repressive policies—and whose populations and governments opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion—became the new training grounds and recruitment centers for mercenaries enlisted in the Iraq War.

Among the largest contingents of non-U.S. soldiers imported to Iraq by Blackwater were former Chilean commandos, some of whom trained or served under the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The story of how nearly a thousand Chileans made their way to Iraq is in many ways the story of the ex-Chilean Army officer Erik Prince contracted to do Blackwater’s recruiting in Chile: Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle.³ Pizarro, a passionate defender of Pinochet, worked as a translator for the U.S. military in Latin America in the 1990s before becoming a liaison between more than a dozen Latin American governments and U.S. weapons manufacturers. When the U.S. invasion of Iraq began in 2003, Pizarro discovered Blackwater USA and almost overnight became a trailblazer in recruiting hundreds of low-cost Latin American mercenaries for it and other private military firms operating in Iraq. “From a Latin-American point of view, my story is not believable,” Pizarro said in a lengthy two-and-a-half-hour interview. “From an American point of view it’s the American story of success.”

Pizarro, who prefers to be called “Mike,” is a dual citizen of Chile and the United States, having been born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where his father worked at Paramount Pictures as an artist, drawing cartoon characters. His father also worked as a driver for UPS, and his mother worked as a teller for Bank of America. Shortly after Socialist presidential candidate Salvador Allende won the presidency in Chile in 1971, becoming the first democratically elected Marxist head of state in the hemisphere, the Pizarros returned to their native Santiago. Two years later, Allende’s government would be overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat that brought to power one of the world’s most notorious dictators. To understand the significance of Blackwater recruiting Chilean mercenaries for deployment in Iraq—and enlisting an apologist for Augusto Pinochet as Blackwater’s point man—it is necessary to understand the U.S. government’s role in Chile over the four decades that preceded the 2003 Iraq invasion.

When he launched his campaign for Chile’s presidency, Salvador Allende had been a Chilean senator for twenty-five years; he campaigned with his “Popular Unity” movement on pledges to improve the lives of millions of impoverished Chileans.⁴ On September 4, 1970, Allende narrowly—but freely and fairly—won a hotly contested presidential race in which right-wing parties, the CIA, and large transnational corporations aggressively backed his opponent. Allende had defied a decade-long “major covert effort,” in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to “reduce chances of Chile being the first American country to elect an avowed Marxist president.” ⁵ Allende’s victory, a historic moment in Latin American politics, alarmed the Washington power structure and large U.S. corporations like PepsiCo, Anaconda Copper, and ITT, which had backed Allende’s opponent. The Nixon White House immediately undertook a two-track covert plan to prevent Allende from being inaugurated or to overthrow his government if it took power.⁶

The Chilean Congress, however, overwhelmingly ratified Allende as president, and the Socialist leader moved quickly to implement his program, known as “La vía Chilena al socialismo” (“the Chilean Way to Socialism”). This included nationalization of large industries, the implementation of government-run healthcare and educational systems, land redistribution, literacy campaigns, and free milk programs for children. Allende reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in defiance of Washington and was close to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who spent a month in Allende’s Chile.

Throughout Allende’s short-lived presidency, the Nixon administration—with the cooperation of large U.S. corporations and powerful media outlets in Santiago—aggressively fomented unrest within Chile and isolated it economically. In a cable to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Edward Korrey reported telling Chilean authorities: “Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean to utmost deprivation and poverty.”⁷ Nixon, meanwhile, issued a directive saying the United States should “Make the [Chilean] economy scream.”⁸ By 1973, U.S.-influenced hyperinflation and strikes had gripped the country, while Washington supported a media campaign inside Chile aimed at blaming and ultimately bringing down the Allende government.⁹

On the morning of September 11, 1973, General Pinochet—Commander in Chief of the Army—coordinated a massive military operation that surrounded the presidential palace, La Moneda. In a radio recording of Pinochet instructing his troops during the coup, the General is heard saying, “Kill the bitch and you eliminate the litter.”¹⁰ Shortly after 9:00 a.m.—with gunfire and bombs in the background—Allende addressed the nation on one of the few radio stations still operating. “Having a historic choice to make, I shall sacrifice my life to be loyal to my people,” Allende said. “I can assure you that I am certain that the seeds planted by us in the noble consciences of thousands and thousands of Chileans will never be prevented from growing.”¹¹ Within hours, Salvador Allende was dead—allegedly having committed suicide—and one of the darkest eras in the country’s history had begun. “The [U.S. government] wishes to make clear its desire to cooperate with the military Junta and to assist in any appropriate way,” said a classified cable from the White House Situation Room dated two days after the coup. “We welcome General Pinochet’s expression of Junta desire for strengthening ties between Chile and U.S.”¹²

With the support of Washington, the junta quickly dissolved Congress and Pinochet was declared president. Thousands of Allende supporters and suspected “communist sympathizers” were hunted down by the junta’s forces. Thousands were brought to Estadio Nacional de Chile between September and November 1973; hundreds were executed, thousands tortured.¹³ The number of Chileans killed in the early days of the Pinochet regime will never be known, but the CIA station in Santiago reported that by September 20, “4,000 deaths have resulted so far from the [coup] and subsequent clean-up operations.” Four days later, the CIA estimated the number at 2,000 to 10,000.¹⁴ According to a secret briefing paper prepared in October 1973 for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger titled “Chilean Executions,” the Junta had massacred some 1,500 civilians, summarily executing between 320 and 360 of them.¹⁵ “During a ruthless seventeen-year dictatorship, the Chilean military would be responsible for the murder, disappearance and death by torture of some 3,197 citizens—with thousands more subjected to savage abuses such as torture, arbitrary incarceration, forced exile, and other forms of state-sponsored terror,” wrote investigative researcher Peter Kornbluh in his groundbreaking book The Pinochet File. “Within weeks of the coup, Pinochet created a secret police force empowered to eliminate any and all enemies of his regime.”¹⁶ So brazen was the junta—and so confident in its backing by the United States—that it murdered U.S. citizens in Chile and targeted Chilean dissidents, such as Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, in Washington, D.C. Letelier and his U.S. research assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, were killed in a 1976 car bombing fourteen blocks from the White House.¹⁷

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the brutality of the Chilean junta, Jose Miguel Pizarro, Blackwater’s Chilean recruiter, remained a staunch defender of Pinochet and the coup. “It’s exactly the same war on terror” that the Bush administration has waged, Pizarro argued. “I believe there was a major effort of the Chilean Army, the Chilean Navy, and the Chilean Air Force, to make sure that a lot of people got arrested in order to clear them up immediately, but very few people remained in actual custody after the first three or four weeks of the military putsch.” Mass executions, Pizarro said, simply did not happen. He did not deny that there was a “military government” in Chile, but he asserted, “to claim that the amount, the scale of the corruption or the human right abuses, to claim that there was an actual, real military dictatorship, is a flat-out lie.”

Pizarro grew up proud in Pinochet’s Chile with dreams of serving in the Chilean Army: “I got a picture of myself when I was seven with a plastic rifle in my hands so—it’s funny—I have never wanted to be anything else besides an Army officer.” Despite the well-documented atrocities committed under the Pinochet regime in Chile, Pizarro said, “Funny because I spent those seventeen years of military government living in Santiago. I never saw troops shooting, arresting, killing, doing anything wrong in any way, in any shape, or in any form.” He said allegations of Pinochet overseeing “human rights abuses at an institutional level” are “a flat-out lie.” Instead, Pizarro painted a picture of Pinochet as a man who restored democracy to Chile, stamped out communism, and cracked down on Cubans from Fidel Castro’s government who had filed into Chile as “advisers” after the election of Allende. As for allegations of mass torture, Pizarro said that, too, did not happen, adding that the Chilean definition of torture is liberal. When asked if he personally knew anyone who was tortured, he recalled a story told by a family friend whose father was taken in 1973 when they were in the midst of a barbeque, “and then the military stormed in, and they took my daddy prisoner. They keep him for forty-eight hours, and then they kicked him out on a highway.” Pizarro said the official government documentation determined 2,871 people were killed under the dictatorship, adding, “After three years in Iraq, you have less than 3,000 casualties.” Absolutely, he acknowledged, “there were human rights abuses” in Chile, but he asserted they were committed by “secret police, by little tiny groups of corrupted officials.” There were human rights abuses “by Chilean standards,” he said. “By Colombian standards, we were having, I mean, I don’t know, a picnic.”

Pinochet was, according to Pizarro, “A great patriot that was poorly advised by ill-prepared civilian and military advisers in terms of public relations, in terms of international image. Again, PR. Everything he was doing was right. He was building bridges, creating schools, creating new businesses. He was copying the model of the United States. He tightened up our ties with the U.S. He was fighting communism, fighting corruption, fighting the terrorism. He was doing exactly the right things that every president is supposed to be doing. However, he was so ill advised in terms of public relations that he didn’t understand the importance of bringing on board the press, the media. He didn’t understand the term transparency. We didn’t have anything to hide.” Pizarro called that his “negative assessment” of Pinochet.

Even though Allende was elected in an internationally recognized democratic election, Pizarro asserted that Pinochet’s coup was necessary to restore democracy to Chile. “General Pinochet decided to rebuild the nation, divide the nation in regions, send the civilians to Chicago to study economy, change the traditional economical model of Chile up to 1973, to make a mirror image of the United States of America. So he did that,” Pizarro recalled with pride. “And overnight, in less than ten years, this little, tiny banana, third-world nation turned out to be the model, and it is today still, the economical and political model of the region. The most stable nation, Spanish-speaking nation in Latin America.” Pizarro says that the civilian governments that succeeded Pinochet’s regime have feared that the Chilean military will once again take power, as it did in 1973, if the government is corrupt. As a result, he says civilian leaders in Chile have engaged in historical revisionism about the Pinochet era aimed at demonizing the Chilean armed forces to “destroy the image of the military, present them as corrupt, dumb, banana-oriented, whatever, just destroy their image and make sure they never come to power again.” This history has endured, Pizarro argued, because “the right-wing parties of Chile are too calm, too silent, too comfortable, and they’re not being aggressive and responsible enough to defend what really happened, to tell the people what really happened in Chile during those seventeen years.”

Back in 1987, with Pinochet firmly in control of Chile, Pizarro finished high school and headed straight for the National Military Academy, where he graduated four years later as a second lieutenant. On graduation day, he shook General Pinochet’s hand and began his career in Chile’s armed forces. Pizarro moved around in various regiments and worked as a translator for the Army, translating for Chilean generals meeting with their foreign counterparts. That brought him in contact with military personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Santiago. In 1995, Pizarro said he struck up a friendship with one U.S. officer in particular, whom he declined to name. He listened to his new American friend and his colleagues speak of their adventures across the globe—from Panama to the Gulf War—with the U.S. military. Pizarro watched their videos and joined them at their homes for cookouts. “I was overwhelmed by their professionalism, their esprit de corps, their way of spreading good words, good news, their way of working. These guys were warriors,” Pizarro recalled. “They went to a war, they won the war, they went back home, and they never went, you know, crazy, or cuckoo, or unreliable. They were normal people. And so it was very motivating for me to think, Maybe, maybe I can be a part of this, maybe.” Pizarro began thinking of leaving the Chilean forces to join the U.S. military. “I love the Chilean Army,” he said. But “I have an opportunity because I have dual citizenship to join an army of a nation that has the same goals of democracy of Western society that Chile [has], but they’re actually deploying troops. I [felt] like a doctor that will study for thirty years and never, ever, ever operate [on] a single human being. I’m a professional. I want[ed] to deploy.” About a month after informing his superiors in Chile, Pizarro joined the U.S. Marines, “guaranteed deployed within ninety days. I love it. I was the happiest guy.”

Pizarro began his U.S. military career training at Paris Island, South Carolina, and then at the U.S. Armor School in Fort Knox, Kentucky. When he graduated in 1996, he says the commander of the Marine Detachment at Fort Knox called him into his office.

“Jose, is it true that you were a Chilean Army Officer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“Yes, sir. Better than English.”

“Maybe we’re going to have a career move for you,” the commander told Pizarro. Shortly after that conversation, Pizarro was sent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina before being ordered by the Second Marine Expeditionary Force to work for three years, from 1996 to 1999, “at the Marine unit specializing in military operations in South America, called the Unitas.” Pizarro says that for the next three years, he traveled throughout Latin America working with U.S. Southern Command as a translator for “lieutenant colonels, colonels, and admirals from the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps going down to South America. Either if they needed to go for a forty-eight-hours meeting with the Commander in Chief of the Brazilian Marine Corps, they took me as a translator, or if they needed to conduct a three-week military exercise in Colombia, I went over there with a lieutenant colonel, with a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel as a translator. So I loved it. It was a super, super-interesting experience. I went to every single nation in Latin America, except Bolivia. I went to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, you name it. I was having the time of my life learning how to present U.S. foreign policy, U.S. defense atmospheric policies to the armed forces in Latin America.”

After three years working with Unitas and the U.S. Southern Command, Pizarro decided to take his experience to the private sector. In 1999, he said, he “offered my services” to the U.S. weapons manufacturer General Dynamics. He said the connections he made during his work with the U.S. military in Latin America put him in a prime position to help General Dynamics expand its sales and marketing in the region. “I knew [Latin American governments’] needs for helicopters, weapon systems, etc.,” Pizarro recalled. “I believe I grasped a certain degree of understanding of their needs, their budgets, their budget culture, etc.” General Dynamics hired Pizarro and, he says, made him the head of its Latin American division. “I was in charge of sales of Mark 19, MK19, GOA19, which is automatic grenade launchers, rockets, and electric airborne, helicopter-borne, electric helicopter-borne machine guns,” said Pizarro. He worked with General Dynamics for a year and a half and said he made so much money in salary and bonuses pushing weapons to Latin American governments that he was able to start his own company. “I realized, hey, I have enough money to, you know, create my own company and work for me instead of working for somebody else.”

In 2001, Pizarro started Red Tactica (Tactical Network), a company that would serve as a liaison between Latin American governments and U.S. weapons manufacturers. “Because every single Latin American Government has a military attaché, a naval attaché, an air force attaché, and a police attaché on separate buildings actually, times sixteen countries, sixteen countries times four military attachés, that was a major, major market for me,” Pizarro said. “So we went, for example, to the Argentinean Embassy. ‘Good morning, my name is Mike Pizarro. I’m a U.S. citizen, and I’m also a Chilean citizen. I’m bilingual. I’m bicultural. I know exactly, sir, Admiral, what you’re looking for. You’re looking for submarines, torpedoes, radars, electronic communication system,’ etc., etc.” Eventually, Pizarro struck up a relationship with virtually every defense and military attaché from “friendly” Latin American nations and earned a reputation as a go-to guy for Latin American countries seeking to purchase specialized weapons systems from major defense companies.

Pizarro hotly denied that he was an arms dealer and scoffed at the label. Instead, he said, he was selling “business intelligence” to Latin American officials he characterized as essentially paying him to do their jobs. “A military attaché by definition is a gift, is a reward, is a promotion, is a vacation in Washington. You’re not supposed to actually work,” Pizarro said. “That is in the Latino world. For us, if you’re a general and you get promoted to a senior general, you get a year of vacation, a paid vacation with your entire family in Washington, D.C. So having—and because I knew this—having a guy who can actually do the job for you for a few thousand dollars a month or less than that, it was a major advantage. It was very attractive to them.” Pizarro says he worked with the military attachés from “every single” Latin American nation in good standing with the United States, “selling the information” to them on where they could purchase various weapons systems, military hardware, radars, spare parts—even rifles. Pizarro also sold his services to defense and weapons companies—in both the United States and in Europe—seeking to break into Latin American markets. He would tell these companies, “Well, let’s say you pay me $10,000 a month times three months, I will provide you with enough information and enough business intelligence so your sales-people will know exactly which doors to knock, to which officers they’re supposed to address, and how and when and for how much and for how long.”

Pizarro said he made enough money selling “business intelligence” that he decided in early 2003 to “step away from the company and enjoy the money, enjoy my free time.” Leaving the day-to-day operations of Red Tactica to his business partners, Pizarro began writing for a German magazine focused on military technology. In February 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, a producer at CNN’s Spanish-language channel contacted Pizarro and asked him to come to the network’s Washington bureau to apply for a possible position with the network as a commentator on the war. Pizarro said after testing him out, “They offered me a full-time job for the time of the war. So they put me in a hotel, at the CNN Hotel, at CNN headquarters in Atlanta for a month, plus the previous month in Washington, close to my house. I mean, I was showing up so many times per day that they thought it was necessary for me to be on call. So they provided [me] with a full salary.” All the while, Red Tactica was on “auto pilot.” Pizarro said that during his time in Atlanta, he struck up a friendship with retired Gen. Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and future 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, who was doing commentary and analysis for CNN as well. “I’m so embarrassed to say this,” Pizarro recalled, “but if I needed to ask, if I have a question from the public or a major question from common sense, I just went to the coffee shop of CNN in English,” where he would ask Clark for advice on what analysis to offer on air. Pizarro would then use Clark’s analysis in his own commentary on CNN en Español. “Love the guy,” Pizarro says of Clark. “Love the guy.”

Pizarro’s full-time job with CNN en Espanol lasted until the end of April, when he turned his attentions back to Red Tactica. With the Iraq occupation underway, he began going to military shows and expos looking for new business. In July 2003, Pizarro went to the Modern Marine Expo in Quantico, Virginia, when a “very good-looking” woman at one of the booths caught his eye. It turned out she was a rep for Blackwater USA, Pizarro said, a former police officer in charge of selling Blackwater’s target systems. Pizarro had never heard of Blackwater and struck up a conversation with the attractive representative about Red Tactica helping to market Blackwater’s systems. Pizarro recalled that the Blackwater system was “fantastic. It’s absolutely fabulous. I told them, I can help you to sell that in Latin America.” After questioning Pizarro about his credentials, the Blackwater representative suggested that Pizarro travel down to Blackwater’s compound in Moyock. What he would see on that trip would change Pizarro’s life.

In describing his first visit to Blackwater in the summer of 2003, just as the mercenary boom was getting under way in Iraq, Pizarro speaks with the enthusiasm of a child describing Christmas presents to his friends at school. “My hair was on fire,” he recalled. “It’s a private army in the twenty-first century. A private company with their own training, their own private forces to protect U.S. government facilities in a war zone. It was like out of a Dr. No movie…. It’s like a movie. It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city where you can train with real-life ammunition or paintball, with vehicles, with helicopters. Gosh, impressive, very, very impressive.” Pizarro thought he was essentially going to a souped-up firing and training range, but when he got there, “I saw people from all over the world training over there—civilians, military personnel, army personnel, naval, navy personnel, marines, air force, para-rescue. Wow, it was like a private military base.”

Pizarro said that “within five seconds I dropped the idea of helping them in selling target systems” and began to dream of how he could fit into this incredible movie set. Pizarro said that he didn’t want to blow his opportunity, so “I kept my mouth shut.” In his head, though, he envisioned providing Chilean forces to Blackwater. “I didn’t want to look like a walking suitcase,” he said. “It was a hunch. Like maybe, maybe if I can get enough Chilean Navy SEALs, enough Chilean Army paratroopers, enough Chilean Marine Corps commandos, I know how professional they are, they’re super-young, they’re recently retired, with twenty years or fifteen years of active duty, and working as a supermarket security guard—I mean, I should, in theory, I should be able to create something.” Pizarro said after his first visit to Blackwater, he “spent a few weeks talking to people on the phone back in Chile. I called them from Washington. I hooked up with a few lieutenant colonels, a few retired majors. ‘Can you get a hundred commandos?’ ‘Can you get a hundred paratroopers?’ ‘Can you get Navy SEALs, bilingual within a couple of weeks?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘OK.’ ‘I can get twenty.’ Another guy: ‘I can get seven.’ ‘I can get twenty-five.’” The phone calls led to meetings in Santiago with military officials, but Pizarro said the reception was hardly enthusiastic. He heard the same things over and over: “That sounds illegal”; “That sounds dirty”; “That doesn’t sound right”; “No, we’re not interested”; “You’re going [to] fail.” But Pizarro said these responses “were actually fueling me more. I was convinced that I was doing the right thing.”

A major reason Pizarro said he believed this is that he had been speaking regularly with Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, the private military trade group of which Blackwater would become a prominent member. “[Brooks] doesn’t strike me as an illegal, evil bastard,” recalled Pizarro. “He strikes me as a professional young man. And he told me this is perfectly legal. I mean, I spent countless meetings with his friends at his office. I mean, we both live in Washington, and after I was convinced that I was doing what’s legal, what’s right, what’s correct, then I made up my mind. Nothing will stop me.” In an e-mail, Brooks admitted he met with Pizarro “a few times” but said he didn’t “recall discussion [of the] legality” of Pizarro’s plan. Eventually, after “hundreds of meetings,” Pizarro said he found people from Chile’s military community who believed in his idea of supplying Chilean forces to U.S. companies: “I met the right colonel, the right lieutenant colonel, the right admiral, the right retired personnel.” Pizarro and his comrades hired a private Chilean human resources firm to help recruit men for their plan. When Pizarro felt it was a go, he returned to the United States to make his pitch to Blackwater in October 2003. He said he spoke to Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “Gary didn’t like the project,” Pizarro recalled. “He kicked me out of his office, like, ‘Hey, no way. We’re not going to do this. It’s just, it’s too crazy. Get out of here.’” Then, Pizarro said, he landed a meeting with Erik Prince at Prince’s office in Virginia. As Pizarro told it, he walked into the office and Prince said, “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Mike Pizarro. Do we have five minutes, sir?”

“You got three,” Prince shot back.

Pizarro said he presented Prince with a PowerPoint presentation on the Chilean forces he wanted to provide Blackwater. Within moments, Pizarro recalled, Prince warmed to the idea. “Guess what?” Pizarro recalled with excitement. “When [Prince] was a U.S. Navy SEAL, he was in Chile.” Prince, he said, had a high regard for Chilean forces. “So he knew the Chilean Navy SEALs. He got friends over there. He knew our professionalism, the orientation of our training, how bilingual are our enlisted personnel, and the quality of our officers.” Pizarro recalled that Prince said, “Mike, listen, you convinced me. If you can get one, just one Chilean Navy SEAL to work for me, this is worth it. Go ahead and impress me.” Pizarro said as he was leaving the Virginia office, Prince told him, “Once you’re ready for a demo, give us a call. I will send a few evaluators” to Chile. The next morning, Pizarro was on a plane back to Santiago.

Back in Chile, Pizarro moved quickly. He and his business partners established a company, Grupo Táctico, and rented a ranch in Calera de Tango, south of Santiago, where they could review prospective soldiers. Pizarro’s commercial manager was Herman Brady Maquiavello, son of Herman Brady Roche, Pinochet’s former defense minister.¹⁸ On October 12, 2003, they placed an ad in the leading daily newspaper, El Mercurio: “International company is looking for former military officers to work abroad. Officers, deputy officers, former members of the Special Forces, preferably. Good health and physical condition. Basic command of English. Retirement documents (mandatory). October 20 to 24, from 8:45 am to 5 pm.”¹⁹ As applicants began showing up for interviews with Pizarro and his colleagues, word spread that salaries as high as $3,000 a month were being offered,²⁰ far greater than the $400 monthly pay for soldiers in Chile.²¹ A former soldier who applied for the job told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, “We were informed that a foreign security company needs around 200 former military officers to work as security guards in Iraq.”²² Another said, “I would like to get that job. They pay $2,500 and they told me at the fort that the job entailed going to Iraq to watch several facilities and oil wells.”²³ It didn’t take long for Pizarro to get flooded with applications from retired Chilean officers and those wishing to retire so that they could join this new private force.²⁴

Before he knew it, Pizarro had more than a thousand applications to sort through.²⁵ But just as he was beginning to make progress, the Chilean press began to report on his activities. Reports emerged that a Chilean naval commander had allegedly violated military procedure and announced the job offer to soldiers, while some Socialist lawmakers accused Pizarro’s colleagues of headhunting soldiers.²⁶ Within days of the ad’s appearance in the paper, Chilean parliamentarians began calling for Pizarro to be investigated. “Lawmakers recalled that the Defense Ministry—not a private corporation—is the only body that, at the request of the UN, may select active military members to support the peacekeeping forces in that country. So any other method would be illegal,” reported La Tercera shortly after Pizarro’s project became public.²⁷ Pizarro responded at the time that his activities were “absolutely legal and transparent.”²⁸ The Chilean press also recalled a controversy in July 2002 when Pizarro was quoted by a Brazilian paper, Jornal do Brasil, claiming that Chile’s war academy was reviewing a plan for twenty-six hundred troops from the United States, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Peru to intervene in Colombia’s battle against FARC rebels, under the auspices of the United Nations.²⁹ The Chilean Defense Ministry was forced to issue a public denial, creating an awkward situation between Chile and Colombia.³⁰ There were also rumblings in Chile that Pizarro was working with the CIA. “Obviously, Mike Pizarro is a CIA agent, supported by the FBI and the Imperial Forces of the United States, and obviously, he’s working for President Bush,” Pizarro recalled with sarcasm. “There is a gossip that he also goes to the ranch of President Bush in Texas. I mean, the stories are absolutely flat-out ignorance.”

In the midst of all of this, Pizarro forged ahead. He and his colleagues worked feverishly at their ranch to whittle down the number of men they would present to the Blackwater evaluators from one thousand to three hundred.³¹ They purchased dozens of rubber and ceramic “dummy” rifles for training and painted them black.³² By late October, Pizarro had his three hundred men, and he called Erik Prince. “We’re ready,” he told Prince. “Send your people.” He said Prince told him that he was leaving for Switzerland but gave him Gary Jackson’s cell phone number. Aware of Jackson’s attitude about the project, Prince told Pizarro to wait a few minutes to call Jackson so that Prince could brief the Blackwater president, according to Pizarro. “Then I called Gary, and Gary was obviously not happy,” Pizarro recalled. He said Jackson told him, “OK, I just talked to Erik. This is a fucking waste of time. I’ll send my three evaluators there, but Mike, you better deliver on your promise because this is a complete waste of time,’ blah, blah, blah. He was very negative. But that’s just the way Gary is.”

Back at the ranch in Chile, Pizarro addressed the three hundred men he and his colleagues had chosen for evaluation by Blackwater. “You will be interviewed by American evaluators. They will ask you basic questions,” Pizarro told the Chilean soldiers. “They will test the level of your leadership skills, how smart you are, how well trained you are, etc., your physical ability.” Pizarro said they would be divided into three groups—one for each of the three U.S. evaluators. “It will be a hundred guys per American. It will take basically the entire day. So you need to be patient. I can make no promises. If we can impress these guys, maybe, maybe we’ll be hired to work in Iraq protecting U.S. Consulates and Embassy,” Pizarro said. In the last week of November 2003, Pizarro said, the Blackwater evaluators arrived in Chile. “The three of them, former U.S. Navy SEALs, impressive guys, six foot tall, gigantic, excellent shape, very professional,” Pizarro recalled. “The three of them bilingual. I mean super-impressive. They evaluated 300 guys” in three days. “They went back to the States, and those were the longest fourteen days of my life because for fourteen days there was no news from Blackwater whatsoever.”

In the meantime, the controversy in Chile about Pizarro’s activities was growing. Pizarro said that a few hours before the Blackwater evaluators arrived at the ranch, a Chilean TV station showed up and ended up filming the activities there. On national television in Chile, Pizarro was accused of “training a private army,” under the supervision of U.S. military people, he said. “The news flash presented me like some sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger—Latino version of—it was absurd,” Pizarro recalled. “My family was crying on the phone. My mom was calling, ‘Mike, what are you doing? We’re going to jail.’ ‘No, mom. It’s a dummy rifle.’ ‘It looks so real. You’re going down.’ I mean, even my girlfriend kicked me out.” Despite the mounting controversy and the silence from Blackwater, Pizarro held out hope that his plan would succeed.

Then on December 18, Pizarro said he got an e-mail from Gary Jackson. We’re up. You’re bringing 100 people in February to be evaluated in the United States. Pizarro said he chose his “best 100 guys” and prepared to head to North Carolina. The Chilean soldiers were sequestered in Chile for forty-eight hours before departing and were not allowed to call their families.³³ They went to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, which promptly issued them multiple entry visas.³⁴ On February 4, 2004, Pizarro and seventy-eight Chilean soldiers arrived at Moyock for “evaluation.” Training, Pizarro asserted, “is illegal. You cannot train. They were evaluated.” Pizarro said, “Every single one of them was evaluated for English skills, medical skills, first aid, rifle range, pistol range, driving skills, telecommunication skills, and leadership.” Pizarro was particularly impressed with one exercise in which Blackwater evaluators used toy soldiers to present various scenarios that could occur in Iraq and quizzed the Chileans on how they would handle the situation. It was “very smart, very cheap,” Pizarro recalled with amazement. “It didn’t cost a penny, but it really tested my guys to extreme.” In all, the first batch of seventy-eight Chileans spent ten days at Blackwater. Pizarro said the evaluators “were very impressed” with his men. Only one was sent home, he said, because of an attitude problem.

On February 14, 2004, Blackwater flew the first group of Chilean commandos from North Carolina to Baghdad. “They got deployed immediately,” Pizarro said. “And then I got a contract for another group of seventy-eight within twenty-four hours. So I flew over [to Blackwater] again at the end of February with the second group.” Pizarro recalled with great pride that Gary Jackson—who he said had doubted the project all along—was interviewed by a Chilean newspaper the day the first group of Chileans set off for Iraq, ahead of schedule. “They did incredibly well and they are absolute professionals,” Jackson told La Tercera. “So they are leaving today on a flight that departs in the morning to the Middle East.”³⁵ Jim Sierawski, Blackwater’s director of training, said the deployment happened fast because the Chilean commandos did not need additional training beyond what they had received in the Chilean armed forces. “Their knowledge provides them with the necessary skills to do what they have to do in different missions,” he said.³⁶ “The Chilean guys from group one were so highly trained, I mean the average age was forty-three years old,” Pizarro recalled. “These were highly seasoned commandos.”

Once in Iraq, the Chilean forces were tasked with doing “static protection” of buildings—generally headquarters of State Department or CPA facilities, Pizarro said. The first group of Chileans was deployed in Samawah, where Pizarro said they guarded a CPA building, as well as a regional office in Diwaniyah. The second batch went straight for a hotel in Hillah that had been converted to an occupation building. They also guarded a CPA headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala. “We are confident,” former Chilean Army officer Carlos Wamgnet told La Tercera. “This mission is not something new to us. After all, it is extending our military career.”³⁷ Former Marine John Rivas told the paper, “I don’t feel like a mercenary.” ³⁸ Pizarro traveled to Iraq twice to observe his men on contract with Blackwater, remaining in the country for a month and traveling to all of the sites “from Baghdad to Basra” where Chileans were deployed. “We have been successful. We’re not profiting from death. We’re not killing people,” Pizarro said. “We’re not shooting. We’re not operating on open streets. We’re providing static security services. We do not interact with Iraqi people. We do not patrol the Iraqi street. We never touch, talk, or get involved in any way, shape, or form with civilians in Iraq.” But, as journalist Louis E. V. Nevaer reported soon after the Chileans arrived in Iraq, “Newspapers in Chile have estimated that approximately 37 Chileans in Iraq are seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era. Government officials in Santiago are alarmed that men who enjoy amnesty in Chile—provided they remain in ‘retirement’ from their past military activities—are now in Iraq.”³⁹

Pizarro said that Blackwater was so impressed with the Chileans that the company stopped bringing them en masse for evaluation to North Carolina. Instead, Pizarro said he would bring twenty a month to Blackwater’s compound and the rest would fly directly from Santiago to Jordan, where they would be evaluated by Blackwater officials in Amman before being deployed in Iraq. “We created such level of comfort, of professionalism, of trust…. Blackwater was addicted to us,” Pizarro said. “Basically for the price of one U.S. former operator, they were getting four, sometimes five Chilean commandos.” He described Blackwater’s thirst for more Chileans as “very, very, very aggressive.” In all, Pizarro said he provided 756 Chilean soldiers to Blackwater and other companies over two years and a month. By March 2004 Gary Jackson had become a public backer of the Chilean forces. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, he explained that Chile was the only Latin American country where Blackwater had hired commandos for Iraq. “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals—the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system,” Jackson said. “We didn’t just come down and say, ‘You and you and you, come work for us.’ They were all vetted in Chile and all of them have military backgrounds. This is not the Boy Scouts.”⁴⁰ Amid allegations from Chilean lawmakers that his activities were illegal and that the men Pizarro was recruiting were “mercenaries,” Pizarro registered his firm in Uruguay to avoid legal troubles in Chile. So the contracting was eventually done between Blackwater and a Uruguayan ghost company called Neskowin.⁴¹ “It is 110 percent legal,” Pizarro said in April 2004. “We are bullet proof. They can do nothing to stop us.”⁴²

But as word spread about the use of Chilean commandos trained under Pinochet, it evoked strong condemnation in the country. As a rotating member of the UN Security Council, Chile opposed the war in Iraq.⁴³ “The presence of Chilean paramilitaries in Iraq has caused a visceral rejection in the population, 92% of which just a year ago rejected any intervention of the US in the country,” said Chilean writer Roberto Manríquez in June 2004.⁴⁴ It also sparked outrage and horror from victims of the Pinochet regime. “It is sickening that Chilean army officers are considered to be good soldiers because of the experience they acquired during the dictatorship years,” said Tito Tricot, a Chilean sociologist who was imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship.⁴⁵ The Chilean commandos working for Blackwater “are valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and killing defenseless civilians. What should be a national shame turns into a market asset due to the privatization of the Iraqi war. All this is possible, not only because of the United States’ absolute disrespect for human rights, but also due to the fact that justice has not been done in Chile either. Therefore, members of the Armed Forces that should be in prison due to the atrocities they committed under the dictatorship, walk freely the streets of our country as if nothing had happened. Moreover, they are now rewarded for their criminal past.”⁴⁶

Journalist Gustavo González said that some of the Chileans working for Blackwater “form part of those displaced from active duty by a plan for the modernisation of the armed forces applied in the army by General Luis Emilio Cheyre, the current army chief. Cheyre, like his predecessor, General Ricardo Izurieta, who replaced Pinochet in 1998 as commander-in-chief of the army, carried out a discreet but effective purge, forcing into retirement officers and non-commissioned officers who played a role in the dictatorship’s repression, in which some 3,000 people were killed or ‘disappeared.’”⁴⁷

Despite growing controversy in Chile over the export of “Chilean mercenaries” to fight a war the vast majority of Chileans—and the country’s elected government—opposed, things were moving along smoothly for Pizarro, and he was predicting in the Chilean press that by 2006 he would have three thousand Chileans deployed in Iraq.⁴⁸ In September 2004, Pizarro’s new company, Global Guards, which he says was modeled on Blackwater, placed another ad in El Mercurio—this time recruiting helicopter pilots and mechanics to operate “air taxis” for businesspeople going in and out of Iraq.⁴⁹ La Tercera reported that the pilots would be paid $12,000 a month, while mechanics would earn around $4,000. Within hours, forty pilots and seventy mechanics had sent in their résumés.⁵⁰

But then Pizarro made a terrible miscalculation.

At the height of his operation, in late 2004, Pizarro branched out from Blackwater and began simultaneously working with its direct competitor, Triple Canopy. “Triple Canopy started asking me for hundreds and hundreds of former Chilean paratroopers for static security [in Iraq],” Pizarro recalled. Eager to expand his business, Pizarro said he provided the company with four hundred Chilean guards. “That was a bad mix. I never realized how much [Blackwater and Triple Canopy] hated each other.” When Blackwater got wind of the deal with Triple Canopy, Pizarro said, Gary Jackson told him Blackwater was ending the partnership. “Gary told me that he felt betrayed, that my move was unforgivable. He couldn’t forgive, he could not pardon me, that I betrayed his trust. He was the one who—which in a way is true—he basically helped me to create my own company.” Pizarro said he deeply regrets that his Blackwater contracts fell through and pointed out that the men he was providing Blackwater were “Tier One” soldiers, “top-notch, fully bilingual, former special forces operators,” while Triple Canopy was interested in cheaper “Tier Two” men, “an average former infantry person with limited language skills and limited operational experience.” Even still, Pizarro said, Blackwater would no longer renew his contracts. “I ended up losing Blackwater,” he recalled with obvious disappointment. “Blackwater is a fantastic company.” To add insult to injury, Blackwater independently hired some of Pizarro’s Chilean commandos directly. While he is “disappointed” in Blackwater, Pizarro said, “The good news is [the Chileans were] making a lot more money.”

After he lost the Blackwater contracts, Pizarro continued to provide soldiers to Triple Canopy and Boots and Coots, a Texas company that specialized in fighting oil well fires. Pizarro’s Chilean commandos became known as the “Black Penguins,” a name he said Blackwater gave his men “because we came from a land from the Antarctica area, from the land of the snow; very short, very dark guys, very slow moving, fully equipped. They called us the penguins.” Pizarro took that on as a brand for his forces and developed a logo around the concept. He also said “Black Penguins” was an effort to “emulate Blackwater.” Beginning in July 2005, Pizarro said Blackwater began the process of replacing his Chileans with cheaper Jordanian forces, “Tier Three, definitely. No English… no major military experience, just Jordanian conscripts.” Around the time his Blackwater relationship went sour, Pizarro said, competition had gotten stiff because the “Iraq reconstruction” was put on hold, meaning there were fewer projects for private forces to guard. Many firms, he said, began hiring less-trained, cheaper forces. “We were competing against Salvadorans, Peruvians, Nigerians, Jordanians, Fijians,” he recalled. “We couldn’t compete with them. Our prices were three times their price.”

Blackwater’s Plan Colombia

In the meantime, like many private military firms, Blackwater was internationalizing its force inside Iraq and had broadened out from Chileans, hiring Colombian forces for deployment in Iraq.⁵¹ In July 2005, Jeffrey Shippy, who formerly worked for the private U.S. security company DynCorp International, began trying to market Colombian forces to companies operating in Iraq. “These forces have been fighting terrorists the last 41 years,” Shippy wrote in a Web posting advertising the benefits of hiring Colombian forces. “These troops have been trained by the U.S. Navy SEALs and the U.S. [Drug Enforcement Administration] to conduct counter-drug /counter-terror ops in the jungles and rivers of Colombia.”⁵² At the time, Shippy was offering the services of more than one thousand U.S.-trained former soldiers and police officers from Colombia. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Shippy said he came up with the concept after visiting Baghdad and seeing the market. “The U.S. State Department is very interested in saving money on security now,” Shippy said. “Because they’re driving the prices down, we’re seeking Third World people to fill the positions.”⁵³ At the time, according to the Los Angeles Times, Blackwater had deployed some 120 Colombians in Iraq.⁵⁴ While Gary Jackson refused to confirm that to the Times, Blackwater’s use of Colombian troops became undeniable a year later, in June 2006, when dozens of Colombians blew the whistle on what they portrayed as Blackwater’s cheating them out of their pay in Baghdad.

In late August 2006, thirty-five Colombian troops on contract in Iraq with Blackwater claimed in interviews with the Colombian magazine Semana that Blackwater had defrauded them and was paying them just $34 a day for a job that earned exponentially more for their U.S. counterparts.⁵⁵ Retired Colombian Army Captain Esteban Osorio said the saga began in Colombia in September 2005. “That was when I ran into a sergeant who told me, ‘Sir, they are recruiting people to send to Iraq. They pay good money, like $6,000 or $7,000 a month, no taxes. Let’s go and give them our resumes.’ That number stuck in my head,” Osorio told Semana. “Never in my life had I imagined so much money,” said former National Army Major Juan Carlos Forero. “Who wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of a job where you earn six or seven times what they pay you?” After hearing about the prospect of working for big money in Iraq, Forero went to a recruitment office in Bogotá to hand in his resume. “The company was called ID Systems,” he recalled. “This firm is a representative of an American firm called Blackwater. They are one of the biggest private security contractors in the world, and they work for the United States government.” When he arrived at ID Systems, Forero said he was pleased to see several other ex-military officers—including Captain Osorio, whom he knew. Osorio said a retired Army Captain named Gonzalo Guevara greeted the men. “He told us that we were basically going to go provide security at military installations in Iraq,” he recalled. “He told us that the salaries were around $4,000 monthly.” No longer the rumored $7,000, but regardless, “it was very good money.”

In October 2005, the men said they were told to report to a training camp at the Escuela de Caballeria (School of Cavalry) in the north of Bogotá, where they said ex-U.S. military personnel conducted courses ranging from country briefings about Iraq and the “enemy” to arms handling and a range of firing tests. A Colombian government official told Semana that the military had done a “favor” by lending one of its bases for the training operation. “It is a company backed by the American government that solicited the cooperation of the military, which consists of permitting the use of military facilities, under the condition that they will not recruit active personnel,” the official told Semana. After the training, the men said they were told to be ready for deployment at a moment’s notice. It wasn’t until June 2006 that the call came from ID Systems that Blackwater was ready for them in Iraq—but instead of $4,000, they were now told they would be paid just $2,700 a month. While disappointing, it was still much more money than any of the men were making in Colombia. Major Forero says one evening at midnight they were given contracts to sign and told to be at the airport in four hours. “We didn’t have a chance to read the contract,” he recalled. “We just signed and ran because when they gave it to us they told us that we had to be at the airport in four hours and since everything was so rushed we hardly had time to go to say goodbye to our families, pack our suitcases and head to El Dorado [Bogotá’s airport].” During a journey to Baghdad that took them to Venezuela, Germany, and Jordan, the men finally had time to read the contracts they had just signed. “That’s when we realized that something was wrong, because it said they were going to pay us $34 a day, which is to say that our salary was going to be $1,000 not $2,700,” recalled Forero.

When the Colombians arrived in Baghdad, they immediately raised the issue of their pay with their supervisors and were told to bring it up later. In Baghdad, they learned that they would be replacing a group of Romanian soldiers on contract with Blackwater. “When we joined with those Romanians they asked us how much we had been contracted for and we told them for $1,000.” The Romanians were shocked. “No one in the world comes to Baghdad for only $1,000,” the Romanians said, adding that they were being paid $4,000 to do the same work. The Colombians say they complained to both Blackwater and ID Systems and said that if they were not going to be paid at least the $2,700 a month they were promised, they wanted to be returned to Colombia. “When we got to the base, they took away all our return plane tickets. They brought us together and told us that if we wanted to get back we could do it by our own means,” Captain Osorio recalled. “They told us that he who wanted to go back could do so, but we didn’t have a single peso and where were we going to get in Baghdad the 10 or 12 million pesos for a ticket to Colombia?” He said the supervisors “threatened to remove us from the base and leave us in the street in Baghdad, where one is vulnerable to being killed, or, at best, kidnapped.” Desperate, the men contacted journalists from Semana, which reported on their situation. “We want the people they are recruiting in Colombia to be aware of the reality and not allow themselves to be deceived,” Forero told the magazine. Another alleged, “We were tricked by the company into believing we would make much more money.” Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor confirmed that the Colombians were being paid as little as they alleged but said it was the result of recently revised contractual terms. “There was a change in contract, one contract expired, another task order was bid upon, and so the numbers are different,” Taylor said. “Every single Colombian signed a contract for $34 a day before they went over to Iraq.”⁵⁶ Blackwater said it had offered to repatriate the men after they complained about their pay. In 2007, Captain Guevara, one of the Colombian recruiters who had hired the men for Blackwater, was gunned down in Bogotá.

Business as Usual

While the international mercenary market servicing the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exploded, almost overnight, revelations of training camps and operations like Pizarro’s in Chile surfaced across Latin America. In September 2005, news broke of a secret training camp in the remote mountain area of Lepaterique, Honduras, fifteen miles west of Tegucigalpa.⁵⁷ It was being operated by a Chicago-based firm called Your Solutions, reportedly headed by Angel Méndez, an ex-soldier from the United States.⁵⁸ In the 1980s, the army base at Lepaterique served as a CIA training ground for the Nicaraguan Contras and the headquarters of the notorious Battalion 316,⁵⁹ a U.S.-backed Honduran death squad responsible for widespread political killings and torture throughout the 1980s, when John Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras. Two decades later, a private U.S. company was using it to prepare Honduran soldiers to work for U.S. mercenary companies in Iraq. The instructors “explained to us that where we were going everyone would be our enemy, and we’d have to look at them that way, because they would want to kill us, and the gringos too,” said an unidentified trainee. “So we’d have to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even [if] it was a child.”⁶⁰ Many of the Hondurans recruited by Your Solutions had been among the troops their country sent to Iraq in 2003.⁶¹ The Honduran government subsequently pulled those troops out amid widespread domestic opposition to the war—and right after it was announced that Negroponte was to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. In September, it was revealed that it wasn’t just Hondurans who were being contracted by Your Solutions. At the training camp were more than two hundred Chileans preparing for Iraq deployment.⁶²

Among the Chileans working with Your Solutions overseeing the operation in Honduras was Oscar Aspe, a business partner of Pizarro’s, who had headed one of the Chilean units in Baghdad on the Blackwater contract in 2004.⁶³ A former Chilean marine and Navy commando, Aspe said of his time in Iraq, “I felt more danger in Chile when I did high-risk operations.” ⁶⁴ In Chile, Aspe was allegedly involved in the murder of Marcelo Barrios, a university student and activist killed in 1989.⁶⁵ Human rights advocates claimed it was a political assassination, though no one was convicted. When Honduran authorities learned of the camp in September 2005 and that the Chileans had entered the country on tourist visas, Honduran Foreign Minister Daniel Ramos ordered the Chileans to leave the country, saying the Honduran Constitution prohibited security and military training of foreigners on its soil. “The foreigners better leave the country,” Ramos declared at a news conference. “If not, we will be forced to take more serious measures.”⁶⁶ There was nothing to suggest that Your Solutions had any business relationship with Blackwater. Reports said that the men were to deploy to Iraq with Triple Canopy as part of its contract to provide security for U.S. installations.⁶⁷ Your Solutions general manager Benjamin Canales, a former Honduran soldier,⁶⁸ defended the training in Honduras. “These people are not mercenaries, as some people have called them,” he said. “This hurts because these are honorable people who aren’t bothering anybody.”⁶⁹ He added that the Chileans were being trained as “private bodyguards,” not as a “national army.”⁷⁰ At that point, Your Solutions had already successfully sent thirty-six Hondurans to Iraq and had planned to send another 353 Hondurans abroad, along with 211 Chileans.⁷¹ The men were reportedly to be paid about $1,000 a month⁷²—far less than Pizarro’s Chileans. Aspe was defiant about the expulsion of Your Solutions from Honduras. “Our mission is to arrive in Iraq whether we are expelled or not from [Honduras],” he said.⁷³ By November, Your Solutions was reported to have sent 108 Hondurans, eighty-eight Chileans, and sixteen Nicaraguans to Iraq—in just one day.⁷⁴ Similar operations were reportedly taking place in Nicaragua and Peru. In November 2006, the Honduran government imposed a $25,000 fine on Your Solutions for violating the country’s labor laws. “The fine was imposed because the company was training mercenaries, and the act of being a mercenary is a form of violating labor rights in whatever country,” said a government spokesperson, Santos Flores.⁷⁵ By then, Benjamin Canales had already fled the country.⁷⁶

As for Jose Miguel Pizarro, in October 2005 a military prosecutor in Chile, Waldo Martinez, charged him with “organizing armed combat groups and illegally assuming functions that correspond to the armed forces and police.”⁷⁷ The charge carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Pizarro responded publicly by saying that all of his activities were legal and that he had authorization from the U.S. State Department to operate in Iraq. “We are not mercenaries,” Pizarro said. “We are private international security guards. Mercenaries are criminals who are prosecuted throughout the world.”⁷⁸ He accused Socialist politicians of being behind what he called a “smear” campaign and complained of a “lack of laws here in Chile to file suit against defamation.” Pizarro has maintained that he broke no laws; he has not been convicted of any crimes or violations.

As of late 2006, Pizarro said no action had been taken against him, and he sounded unconcerned about potential future legal troubles. He continued to operate Global Guards and still provided soldiers to Triple Canopy and other companies in Iraq, but it was hardly the “gold rush” it was at the height of his partnership with Blackwater, which ended in December 2005 when the last of his contracts with the company expired. In 2006, Pizarro’s “Black Penguins” were operating at the U.S. regional headquarters in Basra and Kirkuk, as well as protecting Triple Canopy’s offices in Baghdad.⁷⁹ He said he was also “exploring the possibility of working in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Pizarro said he was ready at a moment’s notice to resume his partnership with Blackwater if the company called. Pizarro described what he does as “the most beautiful way of making a living,” and he said he was waiting with great anticipation for the United States to restart its “reconstruction” operations in Iraq, which he said would bring back the “market” for private security. “We will sit tight, and wait for the political environment created by the U.S. government to rebuild Iraq, and we strongly believe that it is a matter of months, not even years, that the American people will realize that it’s mandatory that the United States rebuild that nation,” Pizarro said in October 2006. “And rebuilding means 400 civilian companies moving in,” all of which will require significant security operations from companies like his.

For former Chilean political prisoner and torture victim Tito Tricot, the use of Chileans and other soldiers from countries with atrocious human rights records by the United States is “nothing new.” But, he says, “There is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries. This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs—‘Third World’ mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world—and maximize benefits, i.e.: ‘Let others fight the war for the Americans.’ In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all. It is precisely this dehumanization of the ‘enemy’ that makes it easier for the private companies and the U.S. government to recruit mercenaries. It is exactly the same strategy used by the Chilean military to train members of the secret police and make it easy to annihilate opponents of the dictatorship. In other words, Chilean mercenaries in Iraq is business as usual.”⁸⁰