Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

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.” 1According 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.” 2Throughout 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. 3Pizarro, 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. 4On 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.” 5Allende’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.” 7Nixon, meanwhile, issued a directive saying the United States should “Make the [Chilean] economy scream.” 8By 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.” 10Shortly 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.” 11Within 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. 13The 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. 14According 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.” 16So 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