Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

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. 48In 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.”

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. 51In 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.” 52At 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.” 53At the time, according to the Los Angeles Times , Blackwater had deployed some 120 Colombians in Iraq. 54While 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. 55Retired 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.