Paz Ortega Andrade

"My name is Paz, and I'll do anything to protect my namesake."

- Paz's character quote on her staff menu on the Mother Base menu. Paz Ortega Andrade is the main antagonist from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and turned anti-hero in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.

She is voiced by Tara Strong.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Her real name is Pacifica Ocean and she was a Cipher agent who infiltrated the Militaires Sans Frontièrs during the Peace Walker Incident in 1974. She had taken possession of Metal Gear ZEKE and she gave Big Boss the opportunity to surrender to Cipher. But he resists and after a hard fight, Big Boss comes out the victor and Paz ends in the sea.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
Big Boss finds out that Paz was still alive and a prisoner of XOF, he goes to save both her and Chico. Once you get on the helicopter, he removes a bomb from the belly of Paz, placed by Skull Face to kill Big Boss. However, you will find that Paz had another bomb and saves Big Boss by throwing herself from the helicopter. Before her rescue, Skull Face had promised to Paz that Big Boss would be safe if she would tell him where Zero is, and so, she confessed.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Nine years later, Venom Snake encountered what appeared to be Paz in Mother Base. Miller and Ocelot would elaborate that Paz seemingly gained amnesia due to trauma. After collecting memento photos relating to Paz, Venom Snake encountered her once again, only to find that she was suddenly in a panic. Paz explained that there was still a bomb inside of her, then slowly pulled out the bomb from her stomach. The bomb then exploded and Venom Snake was seemingly caught in the blast only to find himself waking up unharmed. The "hospital room" was revealed to have actually been under construction and only consisted of a metal floor. A butterfly passed by him but it mysteriously vanished when he grabbed it and opened his hand. Having realized that Paz had truly passed away many years ago, Venom Snake finally came to terms with her death. It was heavily implied that what Venom Snake witnessed was a phantom of Paz, and that he had experienced an elaborate and vivid hallucination (Miller and Ocelot did not really appear either) due to his grief (and possibly regret due to not being thorough enough to save her) over losing Paz; in which it was akin to the feeling of a phantom pain.

Early life
Pacifica Ocean was raised in the United States from a very young age.[3] She was taken in by Cipher after becoming an orphan, and felt that she owed him her life. However, her loyalty was partially born out of fear, as she believed that disobeying Cipher would result in "a fate far worse than death". She was also the only agent that had actually met Cipher face-to-face and received orders from him directly, in this case, to contact Big Boss, with other agents only gaining their orders via proxies. She was eventually trained to become a triple agent for the organization, later operating within both the CIA and the KGB. In order to become a Cipher agent she endured many hardships including extreme training, starvation and days spent without sleep. Some of her compatriots died and others betrayed her and left her for dead while she did exactly the same to them. By overcoming these hardships she proved herself to Zero to be the right candidate to strike back at Snake for abandoning him and his organization.

With Cipher's resources, Pacifica adopted the identity of "Paz Ortega Andrade" (the name Paz meaning "Peace" in Spanish), a 16-year-old Costa Rican high school student who cherished peace and was studying the nation's Peace Constitution under the guidance of professor Ramón Gálvez Mena of the yet-to-be-sanctioned United Nations University for Peace.[5] In reality, Gálvez was a fellow agent of the KGB with whom Pacifica was ostensibly serving the Latin American interests of the Soviet Union.[6] Similar to her true past, "Paz" was also an orphan whose mother had died when she was still very young and had lost her grandparents during the Costa Rican Civil War, influencing her supposed passionate hatred of war.

Personality
As "Paz", Pacifica Ocean behaved in an innocent manner, and acted as a genuine lover and believer of the concept of peace. Secretly, however, she harbored no real belief in peace, due to man's violent nature. Possessing pale skin and a perm, Paz was highly aware of her youthful appearance, as she intentionally posed as a teenager to play the convincing role of the "child of peace." In correlation with her disbelief towards the concept of true peace, she claimed that the "peace" sign was an ironic symbol in reference of the letter "V" standing for "Victory."

Unveiling her allegiance to Cipher, Paz's true nature was significantly different and far more calculating.[14] Though she was initially cold and held a cruel view towards members of the MSF, her time spent with them would cause her to develop an attachment towards the group. Being raised by Cipher as an orphan at an early age, Paz admitted that she had never experienced as much enjoyment and peaceful times as she had during her time in MSF. In addition, Zero had led her to believe that she was the ninth person to hold the name "Paz", although this was later revealed to be false. The longer she stayed at MSF's Mother Base, the more her commitment to Cipher's plans wavered. In her tapes, she compared the relaxing, peaceful times she had spent on Mother Base to her intensive training in her earlier life. Her wavering commitment and loyalty to Cipher was such that she tried to delay the plan to hijack ZEKE so that she could enjoy "Peace Day." She also demonstrated herself to be unwilling to kill Chico after he had discovered her sabotaging ZEKE. Furthermore, Paz's concern for Chico's wellbeing during their imprisonment at Camp Omega was one of the rare times in which she wanted to help anyone other than Cipher.

Despite expressing an initial dislike towards Big Boss, Paz expressed an understanding towards his beliefs in one of her tapes; in which she shared his view in regards to war and humanity's desire for conflict. This caused her to relate to Big Boss on a personal level, leading her to develop an attachment towards him and his outlook/goals for MSF's future. In this regard, while projecting her inevitable battle against Big Boss and the possibility that she might die, she expressed feelings of contentment saying that she wouldn't mind dying at the hands of a person like Big Boss. This developed attachment would extend during her interrogation under Skull Face, as Paz willingly chose to side with Big Boss over her former employer Zero; in which she revealed information about Zero, under the belief that it would save Big Boss.

In her final moments, Paz willingly allowed herself to die in an explosion caused by a second bomb hidden inside her; in which she jumped out of the helicopter in order to protect Big Boss, Chico, and the remaining MSF members who were inside said helicopter.

Paz's decision to initiate ZEKE's hijacking stemmed from fear of Cipher subjecting her to a "fate worse than death" should she either fail or otherwise disobey her mission directives, as well as despair that her attempt at delaying her mission was exposed to Cipher. Her attachment to the MSF would cause her to feel conflicted and break down emotionally before finally maintaining her composure as she activated ZEKE. During her hijacking of ZEKE, Paz ultimately revealed that she only viewed the concept of peace as nothing but a mere fantasy. She believed that deterrence as a philosophy had become obsolete and that absolute control of warfare and information is the ultimate approach to achieving an illusion of "peace." Enacting Cipher's goal, she believed that the intelligence community would slowly be united within a world that is governed by electronics and through complete control of information. She was under the belief that Cipher would ultimately watch over the world, guiding the will of the people and society, all while remaining undercover as the world remained blissfully unaware of Cipher's influence; essentially ruling the whole world under a single will.

As part of her mission, she had offered Big Boss to join Cipher in order to act as a messianic figure that would protect Cipher and its operations; acting as Cipher's deterrent. Even as an agent of Cipher as well as sharing Big Boss's view regarding conflict, she didn't seem to view The Boss in a heroic manner as much as Zero and Big Boss did. After Big Boss's refusal to comply with Cipher's offer, Paz decided to carry out Cipher's plan to defame Big Boss and the rest of MSF as dangerous outlaws that would threaten the whole world through the launch of ZEKE's nuke. Paz was directly ordered by Zero to carry out such an alternative outcome in her mission, although she said in her diary that she felt it was extreme.

Paz had an affinity for machines as she revealed to Big Boss during her hi-jacking of ZEKE. In addition, she was skilled at engineering and mechanic-related things, having single-handedly modified ZEKE to be pilotable and even going as far as to lock out the Mother Base control computer to prevent the Mother Base staff from shutting it down, although she kept it secret from the Mother Base staff until she hi-jacked ZEKE.[16] She was trained in deep-sea scuba diving, presumably so she'd escape from Mother Base upon succeeding her mission. It was largely because of this that she ended up surviving her battle with Big Boss, something that Big Boss also suspected. She also may have been proficient with firearms and some form of combat training, as Chico described her as being "armed" when he accidentally stumbled upon her attempt at sabotaging ZEKE as well as when she compared herself to Strangelove whom she viewed as an "out-of-shape" woman that posed no threat to her.

Similar to her compatriots and Strangelove, Paz, or rather, Pacifica, was a tobacco user, although she primarily used snuff tobacco during her mission, something she implied that she was disgusted with.[17] She used the variety of snuff where she puts a pouch of tobacco leaf directly inside her lip for it to absorb, and it was because of this that her Paz identity often had a quirk where she placed her index finger on her upper lip, which was actually a means to keep her snuff in position and prevent it from falling out as she wasn't used to it, something that Snake and Miller recalled shortly after her defeat.[18] In a communication with Zero, Paz inquired as to whether she was actually speaking to him, implying that, even with her unique status of having met Zero face-to-face, she occasionally received orders from proxies like other agents.