Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

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. 33They went to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, which promptly issued them multiple entry visas. 34On 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.” 35Jim 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.” 37Former Marine John Rivas told the paper, “I don’t feel like a mercenary.” 38Pizarro 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.” 40Amid 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. 44It 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. 45The 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