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

by Jeremy Scahill

  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.48 In 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.”

  Blackwater’s Plan Colombia

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

  When the Colombians arrived in Baghdad, they immediately raised the issue of their pay with their supervisors and were told to bring it up later. In Baghdad, they learned that they would be replacing a group of Romanian soldiers on contract with Blackwater. “When we joined with those Romanians they asked us how much we had been contracted for and we told them for $1,000.” The Romanians were shocked. “No one in the world comes to Baghdad for only $1,000,” the Romanians said, adding that they were being paid $4,000 to do the same work. The Colombians say they complained to both Blackwater and ID Systems and said that if they were not going to be paid at least the $2,700 a month they were promised, they wanted to be returned to Colombia. “When we got to the base, they took away all our return plane tickets. They brought us together and told us that if we wanted to get back we could do it by our own means,” Captain Osorio recalled. “They told us that he who wanted to go back could do so, but we didn’t have a single peso and where were we going to get in Baghdad the 10 or 12 million pesos for a ticket to Colombia?” He said the supervisors “threatened to remove us from the base and leave us in the street in Baghdad, where one is vulnerable to being killed, or, at best, kidnapped.” Desperate, the men contacted journalists from Semana, which reported on their situation. “We want the people they are recruiting in Colombia to be aware of the reality and not allow themselves to be deceived,” Forero told the magazine. Another alleged, “We were tricked by the company into believing we would make much more money.” Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor confirmed that the Colombians were being paid as little as they alleged but said it was the result of recently revised contractual terms. “There was a change in contract, one contract expired, another task order was bid upon, and so the numbers are different,” Taylor said. “Every single Colombian signed a contract for $34 a day before they went over to Iraq.”56 Blackwater said it had offered to repatriate the men after they complained about their pay. In 2007, Captain Guevara, one of the Colombian recruiters who had hired the men for Blackwater, was gunned down in Bogotá.

  Business as Usual

  While the international mercenary market servicing the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exploded, almost overnight, revelations of training camps and operations like Pizarro’s in Chile surfaced across Latin America. In September 2005, news broke of a secret training camp in the remote mountain area of Lepaterique, Honduras, fifteen miles west of Tegucigalpa.57 It was being operated by a Chicago-based firm called Your Solutions, reportedly headed by Angel Méndez, an ex-soldier from the United States.58 In the 1980s, the army base at Lepaterique served as a CIA training ground for the Nicaraguan Contras and the headquarters of the notorious Battalion 316,59 a U.S.-backed Honduran death squad responsible for widespread political killings and torture throughout the 1980s, when John Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras. Two decades later, a private U.S. company was using it to prepare Honduran soldiers to work for U.S. mercenary companies in Iraq. The instructors “explained to us that where we were going everyone would be our enemy, and we’d have to look at them that way, because they would want to kill us, and the gringos too,” said an unidentified trainee. “So we’d have to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even [if] it was a child.”60 Many of the Hondurans recruited by Your Solutions had been among the troops their country sent to Iraq in 2003.61 The Honduran government subsequently pulled those troops out amid widespread domestic opposition to the war—and right after it was announced that Negroponte was to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. In September, it was revealed that it wasn’t just Hondurans who were being contracted by Your Solutions. At the training camp were more than two hundred Chileans preparing for Iraq deployment.62

  Among the Chileans working with Your Solutions overseeing the operation in Honduras was Oscar Aspe, a business partner of Pizarro’s, who had headed one of the Chilean units in Baghdad on the Blackwater contract in 2004.63 A former Chilean marine and Navy commando, Aspe said of his time in Iraq, “I felt more danger in Chile when I did high-risk operations.” 64 In Chile, Aspe was allegedly involved in the murder of Marcelo Barrios, a university student and activist killed in 1989.65 Human rights advocates claimed it was a political assassination, though no one was convicted. When Honduran authorities learned of the camp in September 2005 and that the Chileans had entered the country on tourist visas, Honduran Foreign Minister Daniel Ramos ordered the Chileans to leave the country, saying the Honduran Constitution prohibited security and military training of foreigners on its soil. “The foreigners better leave the country,” Ramos declared at a news conference. “If not, we will be forced to take more serious measures.”66 There was nothing to suggest that Your Solutions had any business relationship with Blackwater. Reports said that the men were to deploy to Iraq with Triple Canopy as part of its contract to provide security for U.S. installations.67 Your Solutions general manager Benjamin Canales, a former Honduran soldier,68 defended the training in Honduras. “These people are not mercenaries, as some people have called them,” he said. “This hurts because these are honorable people who aren’t bothering anybody.”69 He added that the Chileans were being trained as “private bodyguards,” not as a “national army.”70 At that point, Your Solutions had already successfully sent thirty-six Hondurans to Iraq and had planned to send another 353 Hondurans abroad, along with 211 Chileans.71 The men were reportedly to be paid about $1,000 a month72—far less than Pizarro’s Chileans. Aspe was defiant about the expulsion of Your Solutions from Honduras. “Our mission is to arrive in Iraq whether we are expelled or not from [Honduras],” he said.73 By November, Your Solutions was reported to have sent 108 Hondurans, eighty-eight Chileans, and sixteen Nicaraguans to Iraq—in just one day.74 Similar operations were reportedly taking place in Nicaragua and Peru. In November 2006, the Honduran government imposed a $25,000 fine on Your Solutions for violating the country’s labor laws. “The fine was imposed because the company was training mercenaries, and the act of being a mercenary is a form of violating labor rights in whatever country,” said a government spokesperson, Santos Flores.75 By then, Benjamin Canales had already fled the country.76

  As for Jose Miguel Pizarro, in October 2005 a military prosecutor in Chile, Waldo Martinez, charged him with “organizing armed combat groups and illegally assuming functions that correspond to the armed forces and police.”77 The charge carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Pizarro responded publicly by saying that all of his activities were legal and that he had authorization from the U.S. State Department to operate in Iraq. “We are not mercenaries,” Pizarro said. “We are private international security guards. Mercenaries are criminals who are prosecuted throughout the world.”78 He accused Socialist politicians of being behind what he called a “smear” campaign and complained of a “lack of laws here in Chile to file suit against defamation.” Pizarro has maintained that he broke no laws; he has not been convicted of any crimes or violations.

  As of late 2006, Pizarro said no action had been taken against him, and he sounded unconcerned about potential future legal troubles. He continued to operate Global Guards and still provided soldiers to Triple Canopy and other companies in Iraq, but it was hardly the “gold rush” it was at the height of his partnership with Blackwater, wh
ich ended in December 2005 when the last of his contracts with the company expired. In 2006, Pizarro’s “Black Penguins” were operating at the U.S. regional headquarters in Basra and Kirkuk, as well as protecting Triple Canopy’s offices in Baghdad.79 He said he was also “exploring the possibility of working in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Pizarro said he was ready at a moment’s notice to resume his partnership with Blackwater if the company called. Pizarro described what he does as “the most beautiful way of making a living,” and he said he was waiting with great anticipation for the United States to restart its “reconstruction” operations in Iraq, which he said would bring back the “market” for private security. “We will sit tight, and wait for the political environment created by the U.S. government to rebuild Iraq, and we strongly believe that it is a matter of months, not even years, that the American people will realize that it’s mandatory that the United States rebuild that nation,” Pizarro said in October 2006. “And rebuilding means 400 civilian companies moving in,” all of which will require significant security operations from companies like his.