A poll published on April 23, conducted by the Centro de Estudios CERC, linked to the governing party showed that 58% of Chileans are against the presence of troops in Haiti. Despite this, the socialist government and the right-wing opposition have come together to support the intervention in the Caribbean nation and thus converted the opinion of the majority into an irrelevant statistic.

On that February 29 when the government of Jean Bertrand Aristide fell under strange circumstances, there were many people surprised to hear President Ricardo Lagos announce the presence in 48 hours of a contingent of 220 members of the Chilean Army in Haiti under the command of a ‘Peace Force’ led by the United States.

That surprise only grew when more became known about the peculiar circumstances of Aristide’s departure from power. Forced into a kind of resignation and then forced into exile by a Franco-American coalition whose presence on the island came with the approval of the UN.

The shadow was also cast over the parliamentarians who legally had to authorize the exit of troops from the country and saw on television the way the President had saved them the trouble.

While the issue was presented by the media as a dramatic effort to prevent a bloody civil war, preceded by accusations of corruption against Aristide’s administration and his Lavalas party. This was a difficult argument to refute without alternative information.

The local press, in an extraordinary display of persistence, managed to leave out the years of nefarious North American and French influence, the bloody dictatorship of the Duvaliers – who was a distinguished guest of the French – or the coups supported by Texaco, or the ‘re-education’ of Aristide in the Clinton years. They didn’t touch the ton ton macoutes nor their transformation into the leaders of the revolt.

According to the government, the participation of Chile in forums like the UN Security Council obliges the state to assume some of the costs, like the ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Haiti, in spite of some parliamentarians like independent Senator Nelson Avila saying that the facts suggest that Aristide had been the victim of a coup d’etat, “just like the one this same government applauded in Venezuela” two years before. That applause had been followed by an embarrassing retraction when Chavez returned to the scene.

Paramilitaries in Iraq

This isn’t the only intervention that is causing problems. On April 5, 2004, three ex-uniformed men returned to the country. They had served along with 192 others as paramilitaries in Iraq, under contract to the US security firm Blackwater.

According to his legal representative, the ex-captain of the Army and military commentator for CNN en espanol, Jose Miguel Pizarro, he is a fugitive from justice, “like Miguel Martinez Ovalle, another ex-captain of the Army, who became a casualty due to mental problems and according to sources worked as a CIA agent,” said deputy Alejandro Navarro.

The very old fashion of fighting a war by using soldiers of a third country – mercenaries or paramilitaries – has become the North American fashion by way of private or outsourced military forces thanks to these “military private enterprises”, including Blackwater, created in 1998 with an estimated income of $1 billion dollars a year.

Other enterprises include Military Professional Resources Inc., Vinnell Corporation (today part of Northrop-Grumman), Aviation Development Corporation and Dyncorp. It’s no coincidence that the largest of these is Halliburton, the company once managed by US Vice President Dick Cheney, still on the payroll.

“All of these paramilitaries have recruited around 20,000 paramilitaries (there are no exact figures) found in Iraq, more than double the British contingent, and containing a larger coalition of countries than that formed by the US government.” (1)

Navarro, the Chilean parliamentarian, has brought a case against the phantasmal Chilean cousin of Blackwater called Red Tactica (or “Tactical Network”, which according to Navarro “has no legal status and pays no taxes”) and is part of an initiative in the Chilean Congress to prohibit the recruitment of paramilitaries and mercenaries in Chile.

“Along with the ethical problem brought by the presence of irregular troops from our countries in conflicts that are not ours, there is the problem of personal and safety and security and responsibility for these in case of accidents,” he added.

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. But as with Haiti, the will of the people is all too easily ignored.

Roberto Manríquez ([email protected]) is a Chilean writer.

translated by Justin Podur

1) William R. Polk. “Una guerra muy privada” Diario La Vanguardia, Barcelona España. Polk is the director of the W.P. Carey foundation. He was part of the State Department in 1961 and responsible for much of the planning of US policy towards the Islamic world until 1965.

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