Pubdate: Tue, 24 Apr 2001
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2001 Salon
Contact:  http://www.salon.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/381
Author:  Fiona Morgan
Note: Fiona Morgan is an associate editor for Salon News.

DEADLY MISTAKE

Why did the Peruvian military shoot down a plane full of innocent people -- 
and why was the CIA involved?

The place where Colombia, Peru and Ecuador come together is the greatest 
cocaine-trafficking air corridor in the world. Small aircraft regularly fly 
coca paste across the Andes Mountains from Peru.

That's why a CIA plane, contracted to do intelligence as part of a drug 
interdiction operation with the Peruvian government, suspected on Friday 
that a small Cessna carrying a family of Baptist missionaries was running 
drugs.

According to statements by a U.S. intelligence official, the three-person 
U.S. surveillance crew, who were civilian contract employees of the CIA, 
informed a Peruvian A-37 fighter jet on patrol about its suspicions, but 
asked it to check its identity before taking any action. The U.S. crew 
communicated only with the Peruvian air force liaison on board the 
surveillance plane. By agreement, U.S. personnel are not in the Peruvian 
chain of command and have no authority to control their actions. Despite 
the American objections, the Peruvian officer on board the CIA plane 
instructed the jet crew to fire on the suspicious Cessna, according to the 
official.

Many questions still linger about what exactly led to the fatal events. But 
onlookers say that they saw the jet fire machine-gun rounds into the 
Cessna, and watched the tiny plane crash into the river. Though Peruvian 
onlookers were able to rescue the Cessna's pilot from the water, Veronica 
Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, had already been killed -- 
according to reports, a single bullet passed through the child's skull as 
she sat in her mother's lap, then entered the mother's body.

Why did they die, and what could have prevented this terrible event? Very 
few questions have been answered at this point, and it will likely be weeks 
before an investigation can offer the public more information.

Contributing to the confusion is the fact that drug interdiction flights, 
like all of our military anti-narcotics operations in Latin America, are 
secretive and complex. They involve not only the military operations of the 
home governments, which themselves lack transparency, but an elaborate 
system of U.S. foreign aid from a variety of agencies, including the 
departments of Defense and State, the U.S. Customs Service, the CIA and the 
Drug Enforcement Agency, which provide host nations with military training, 
equipment and intelligence. Making matters even murkier is the presence of 
numerous American mercenaries, hired as freelance pilots, ground crews and 
intelligence personnel by both the host nations and the United States.

In the past five years, Peru has reportedly shot down roughly 30 planes it 
suspected of drug running, and grounded many more. Coca cultivation in the 
Andean nation has fallen by as much as 60 percent as a result of joint 
U.S.-Peru anti-drug efforts, whose main focus is air interception, the U.S. 
administration said.

On Monday, the Bush administration ordered U.S. surveillance flights 
suspended pending an official investigation. But, anxious to avoid 
jeopardizing an interdiction program that has been, at least in its 
immediate region, a rare success, the administration downplayed the event, 
acknowledging that it was a "tragic error" but calling it an "isolated 
incident." The administration stopped short of blaming the Peruvian 
government, but said its military failed to follow proper rules of 
engagement, and that it acted too hastily by firing against the plane.

The Peruvian military denied any wrongdoing, saying it followed proper 
procedure -- leaving unanswered the question of how a procedure could be 
"proper" that resulted in the death of innocent civilians.

The Bowers tragedy throws a spotlight on the $48 million in narcotics 
control aid that the U.S. government gave to Peru last year, as well as the 
$32 million that came as part of Plan Colombia, the military anti-narcotics 
campaign implemented last year in Andean drug-producing nations. It is 
certain to lead to hard questions about the viability of American 
participation in the interdiction program -- questions concerning not just 
the competence of America's military partners in the region but the 
sprawling, internecine war on coca production itself, a war critics charge 
is unwinnable. Despite the fact that coca production in Peru has dropped, 
coca production in the region as a whole has increased, as growers 
pressured out of Peru have moved into Colombia.

Salon asked Adam Isacson, a senior associate at Washington's Center for 
International Policy, what this tragedy can tell us about our involvement 
in the drug war.

Is Peru the only government that has a policy to shoot down planes involved 
in drug trafficking? And what is the role of the U.S. in that policy?

What we do is hand off the intelligence to that country's military, and 
it's really up to them what they do with it. Peru has chosen to shoot down. 
It's often called jokingly the "You fly, you die" policy. Colombia says 
they shoot down, but they don't do it very often. What they do more often 
is just sort of force down planes and then strafe them on the ground. 
Venezuela hasn't done much of anything lately. But the real air transit 
point is between Peru and Colombia, from the growing areas to the 
processing areas.

Why does Peru have that policy?

I imagine they adopted that policy with a lot of encouragement from the 
United States back in the mid-'90s. Certainly we were pleased when 
[disgraced former President Alberto] Fujimori and [fugitive former spy 
chief Vladimiro] Montesinos adopted that policy.

What do you make of all the confusion between the Cessna, the CIA plane and 
the Peruvian jet?

We're not going to know that for a while; that's going to be for the 
investigation. When we hand over this sort of intelligence to the 
Peruvians, though, there's either an implied or a specific agreement that 
they are going to follow procedures -- trying to communicate with the 
plane, dipping your wings, shooting a warning shot. It doesn't look like 
they did any of that.

It looks like they just fired?

That's what we're hearing from the first eyewitness accounts. If that's 
true, than it's more than just a few miscommunications. It's a complete 
neglect of what they've been told to do. We're just not going to know until 
they do a real investigation.

If this mission was part of our anti-narcotics aid to Peru, why was the CIA 
involved?

It's inter-agency, they like to say. The defense department is supposed to 
be in the lead on this, but of course the CIA are one of the many agencies 
involved. And since they have access to a lot of the good equipment, it 
makes sense that that was a CIA plane. I'm not sure, but I think there was 
a private contractor involved too, whether they own the plane or whether 
they were pilots -- pilots are always in short supply -- I'm not sure yet 
what their role was. But there were CIA and contractors and a Peruvian air 
force official on board the plane that was watching that gave the 
information to the jet.

What does this tragedy draw our attention to?

More than anything, I think it just draws attention to the militaries we're 
working with in that region. The fact that this was done with U.S. 
intelligence, with a plane given by the U.S., by pilots and airmen trained 
and equipped by the U.S. -- everything there was paid for, bought and sold 
by us. The A-37 was given to Peru for counternarcotics purposes.

It's time that we started looking a little more closely at who we're giving 
this stuff to. These are institutions with long histories of corruption and 
human rights abuses. So that obviously calls into question their 
professionalism and what they can be relied on to do. We may be lucky that 
this hasn't happened before.

Are these interdiction missions part of Plan Colombia?

This predates Plan Colombia, it's something they've been doing since at 
least the mid-'90s, but it is being beefed up somewhat by the money that 
was in last year's Plan Colombia aid package. Again, I'm not sure where the 
intelligence plane took off from, but it probably took off from this site 
in Manta, Ecuador, which is getting a lot of money for refurbishment and 
construction from the Plan Colombia aid package.

What other countries do these flight missions?

Looking for suspicious aircraft is something we do really everywhere from 
Bolivia all the way up to the border of Mexico. It's most intense, though, 
in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, where obviously the cocaine comes 
out of first and also where a lot of the coca paste gets taken to be 
processed into crystal cocaine -- that's what a lot of the flights going 
out of Peru do.

Does this relate at all to the flight that killed U.S. Army pilot Jennifer 
Odom in Colombia last year?

That plane was doing signals intelligence -- they were actually listening 
in to stuff going on on the ground. Whereas this one was doing visual, 
looking up signals that had already been found by radar sites within the 
region, trying to ID the plane, I think. So it's a little different, but 
it's part of the same effort. It's all counterdrug and all gathering 
intelligence by air. The Jennifer Odom plane was certainly a lot more 
sophisticated than what the CIA was using.

Peru has certainly gone through a lot of big changes in the past year, 
including the corruption scandal that brought down President Alberto 
Fujimori and his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos. How is that affecting the 
counternarcotics efforts in Peru?

To the best I can tell, it's not having much effect on what's going on. All 
the political turmoil is in Lima, on the coast, and most of the 
counternarcotics stuff is happening well over the Andes. For most 
Peruvians, it might as well be on a different planet. So the work with 
those particular units of the police, the air force, the navy, has probably 
remained about the same.

Actually, now that Fujimori is gone, it's probably a little more 
politically palatable to start jacking up military aid, which is something 
that's going to happen in 2002 if you look at George Bush's request. The 
only thing that might have been disrupted over the past few months is the 
fact that many of the officers loyal to Montesinos were forced out. So 
there may be some intelligence gathering and command and control [may] have 
been disrupted a little bit. But that's probably the only way it's been 
weakened.

How has the implementation of Plan Colombia affected Peru?

Last year, the only money in Plan Colombia for Peru was about $32 million 
for helicopters. Since Peru had just stolen an election, it wasn't really 
politically palatable or possible to give it to them. But they're going to 
get more next year.

A lot of people are speculating that most of the aid for Colombia's 
military is being concentrated in an area right along Colombia's border 
with Ecuador and Peru, that we're going to be pushing not just drug 
trafficking but also violence and refugees into Ecuador and Peru. So we may 
see an increase in coca and violence on the other side of the border.

That spillover is a big worry about Plan Colombia -- that's probably one 
reason why they're proposing $90 million in military aid for Peru now. You 
push the coca growers out of one place, coca's still profitable, so they 
might just cross the river and start cutting down jungle on the Peruvian side.

Does that military response have anything to do with their "shoot 'em out 
of the sky" approach?

I think that attitude has been around for a while now. They've shot down 
about 30 planes in the past five years or so.

Why don't we hear more about them? Have there been any more Americans 
killed, or any conflicts in the air between drug trafficking planes and 
intelligence or military planes?

If there have been dogfights in the air, I don't know about them. I think 
usually they're shooting down these little Cessna planes. According to 
official U.S. reports, they've always been narcos, and we've had no basis 
to challenge that and we've been assured that when they do shoot them down, 
it's after trying to contact them several times, trying to signal to them 
in the air, firing warning shots, and only if they keep going do they shoot 
them down or force them down. But this mistake last week makes you wonder 
how often they are asking questions first before they shoot.

In general, this whole operation happens with almost no transparency. 
You're asking me some very basic questions here and I'm still only able to 
give you very basic answers. Why is the CIA involved? What are these 
contractors? How do they chose their targets? We don't know and nobody's 
really asking.

Who is in charge of the oversight of these missions?

The oversight eventually falls on Congress -- the international relations 
and armed services committees that are paying for this stuff. When staffers 
go down there they get flown to these bases and shown some select 
professional troops and a PowerPoint presentation telling them how 
effective they've been. But nobody asks questions about how we can avoid 
situations like this one.

Rather than have congressional staff, who are really overworked and 
underpaid, do all of this, [the agencies] should be forced to make 
information about this more and more accessible, so that there could be 
more of an evaluation of where we're headed with this.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart