Pubdate: Thu, 11 Jul 2002
Source: Detroit Free Press (MI)
Contact:  2002 Detroit Free Press
Website: http://www.freep.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/125
Author: Gary D. Robertson
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?172 (Peruvian Aircraft Shooting)

DRUG WAR'S INNOCENT VICTIM FORGIVES BUT JUST CAN'T FORGET 

Year Later, Missionary Still Awaits An Apology 

GARNER, N.C. -(AP)- When he got off the plane that brought him to North
Carolina, Jim Bowers wondered aloud to his mother whether he could ever get
the images out of his mind: 

The smoke from the guns of a Peruvian Air Force A37 that shot through the
small aircraft carrying his missionary family. The screams in Spanish of the
Cessna's pilot: "They're killing us! They're killing us!" The blood on his
infant daughter. His wife slumped over in her seat. 

More than a year has passed since a bullet took the lives of Bowers' wife,
Roni Bowers, and his daughter, Charity, in the sky over the Amazon River. A
Baptist, Bowers credits his faith with sustaining him and his 7-year-old
son, Cory. 

He says he's forgiven the U.S. and Peruvian officials who mistook his
family's plane for a drug smuggler's. The two governments have acknowledged
errors were made, and President George W. Bush called him to express regret. 

But Bowers still longs for an apology from the CIA.

"From the very beginning I wasn't expecting anything except for someone to
admit they did something wrong and to be punished for it," Bowers said athis
mother's home in Garner. "Then I realized as the months went by that there
wasn't going to be anybody punished. 

"It doesn't matter how much you forgive a person. When they do something
wrong, they should still suffer the consequences." 

After the accident, a U.S. program to force down or shoot down planes
suspected of carrying drugs in Latin America was halted. Last week, a senior
Bush administration official said the program is expected to resume. The
timing remains uncertain, the official said. 

Bowers, 39, of Muskegon has made dozens of speeches about his experience at
Bible colleges and churches across the Americas and Europe. 

Jim and Roni Bowers worked in relative anonymity for five years along the
Amazon in northeastern Peru, spreading the Christian gospel among riverside
villages and training ministers through the Association of Baptists for
World Evangelism. The Bowers lived with their children aboard a houseboat
that sailed up and down the river. 

On April 20, 2001, the family, flown by fellow missionary Kevin Donaldson,
was returning from the Colombian border where they had picked up a permanent
resident visa for Charity. CIA personnel aboard a surveillance plane spotted
the aircraft and alerted Peruvian officials. A Peruvian interceptor arrived
and shot the aircraft as the CIA crew debated whether the plane fit a drug
smuggler's profile. 

Roni Bowers and Charity, who had been adopted in Michigan a few months
earlier, were dead. Cory and Jim Bowers weren't injured. Donaldson was shot
in the legs, but still managed to land the pontoon plane on the river. They
reached land and got help. 

In the months following the shooting, government reports blamed errors by
the Peruvian military, procedural mistakes and the poor language skills of
personnel from both countries for misidentifying the plane. 

Jim Bowers brought the bodies back to America and settled in Garner, a town
of 20,000 people south of Raleigh, where tobacco fields are giving way to
suburban subdivisions. There, he and Cory moved in with his mother, Wilma
Bowers. 

Bowers took a job at Bethel Baptist Church in nearby Cary, leading Spanish
Bible studies and church services for the area's growing Hispanic
population.
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