October 5, 2007 (LPAC)--Blackwater USA's recruitment of South American war criminals, particularly in Chile, is one of the clearest examples of Lyndon LaRouche's charge that Blackwater "is an Allgemeine SS"--a private mercenary operation modeled on the British East India Company.
In the fall of 2003, while the Chilean government and population fiercely opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Blackwater's representative Jose Miguel Pizarro and his Tactical Network Group, deployed to that country in search of former military commandos to recruit as mercenaries in a colonial army. Pizarro claims to have recruited 750 men to go to Iraq, in flagrant violation of Chilean law.
The destruction and discrediting of Ibero-America's military institutions in the 1980s and 1990s, a prelude to Felix Rohatyn's "Revolution in Military Affairs" now ongoing in the United States, facilitated the task. The fact that Chile experienced a "dirty war"--the savage conflict orchestrated in the 1970s and 1980s by Henry Kissinger's Nazi Operation Condor, which specialized in torture, murder and disappearances of political opponents--made it a particularly attractive recruiting ground to Blackwater.
As a Kuwait-based intelligence officer told Pacific News Service in 2004, the dirty wars that occurred in several South American nations had produced "military men well-trained in dealing with internal subversives. They are well-versed in extracting confessions from prisoners." That is, torture.
Jose Miguel Pizarro's role in helping to create what he described to author Jeremy Scahill as "a private army in the twenty-first century," is instructive. He was an ardent defender of Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship and the atrocities it committed. The "commercial manager" of his mercenary recruitment operation was Herman Brady Maquiavello, son of Pinochet's former Defense Minister Herman Brady Roche. When his illegal recruitment in Chile forced him out of the country, he set up shop in Uruguay, boasting that "we are bullet-proof. They can do nothing to stop us."
Chilean officers purged from the military when it was downsized, including those charged with human rights atrocities under the Pinochet regime, eagerly responded to the advertisements that Pizarro brazenly placed in Chilean newspapers. Knowing that their war-crimes past could make them vulnerable to arrest either in Ibero-America or Europe, these mercenaries arranged with Blackwater to travel directly to the U.S., and then straight to the Mideast to avoid any possibility of arrest, according to several Ibero-American media sources.
