Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

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.”