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

by Jeremy Scahill

  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 silen
t, 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, R
ed 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.