MISSIONARY KILLED

She And Her Baby Were Victims Of A Failed Policy

Only because Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter were Americans
did we hear of their deaths. Mrs. Bowers and her husband, Jim, were
Baptist missionaries in Peru. The Peruvian air force fired on a small
plane in which the Bowers family was flying. It was piloted by
another missionary.

The pilot, though injured, was able to land. He, Jim Bowers and the
Bowers' 6-year-old son, Cory, survived.

A bullet from the Peruvian plane had pierced Mrs. Bowers' heart and
her baby's skull.

The deaths of two Americans were big news. They ignited a dispute
over whether the pilot had filed a proper flight plan, and whether
any Americans had anything to do with the shooting.

Americans who are paid by the U.S. government help the Peruvian
authorities track dope-smuggling planes. The Peruvians said they
thought the missionaries' plane was flown by drug dealers and that
the pilot failed to answer radio messages.

Soon the parties involved will stop playing the blame game and the
Bowers family will recede from our consciousness. Before it does, let
us consider how many innocent people -- not American clerics whose
deaths would make the news, but innocent people nonetheless -- have
been killed by the aggressive so-called war on drugs in South America.

There is no telling. But in such a war, fought in countries where
police have unbridled authority, there are bound to be collateral
casualties.

And let's consider its cost. The Bush administration inherited a $1.3
billion that's billion with a "b" commitment to something called Plan
Colombia. That money is to be given to the Colombian government
alone. It doesn't count what we have been spending for decades in
other countries.

If that amount could be calculated, it would be staggering. We hire
companies to operate expensive radar equipment. We arm soldiers. We
even send our own soldiers down there, often clandestinely.

And it isn't working. You haven't heard that there is any less
cocaine in this country, have you?

We need to turn our attention instead to our own country. We can't
stop the supply, so we should attack the demand. The money we are
giving away in South America could be put to better use in prevention
and cure programs here at home.

The old ways of controlling narcotics traffic are not working.
Scratch that. There are no old ways of controlling narcotics traffic.
It has never been controlled. We need to abandon our old ways of
trying and look to new solutions.