AMERICA'S SHADOW DRUG WAR

A Gruesome Shoot-down On The Amazon Hints At A Large And Growing U.S.
Narcowar In Latin America. A Report From The Front Lines

Iquitos is the kind of town you might expect to read about in the pages of
Joseph Conrad, tucked hard along the Amazon and alive with equal parts
danger and promise.

It draws missionaries of all kind, zealots intent on changing the world by
starting here. It was two such crusades--one to stop the narcotraffic that
runs on this river and one that is trying to bring Jesus to its darkest
corners--that collided 140 miles east of town April 20 when a Peruvian jet
shot down an unarmed Cessna carrying missionaries back from an upriver stint.

The results were predictable: Roni Bowers, 35, and Charity, her
seven-month-old daughter, killed by the gunfire that forced the crash
landing of their plane.

The narcocrusaders are everywhere in this part of the world, as common here
as the Internet entrepreneur seemed to be in the U.S. two years ago. Theirs
is a growth business.

Everyone seems to be on one side of the game or the other--except those
unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle.

Charts of coca production and the violence that goes along with
it--kidnappings, massacres, executions--look like a NASDAQ chart from 1998.
The jungles of Colombia and Peru and Bolivia are dotted with the
paraphernalia buttressing a shadowy and bloody war: American radar systems,
air bases and special-operations training units.

One of the things that astonished many Americans about the one-sided gun
battle over the Amazon was the fact that a CIA jet had been working the
skies, helping track the Cessna carrying Bowers and her baby. Though those
flights were suspended last week as the U.S. investigated what had gone
wrong, they are part of a significant U.S. presence in the region. On any
given day in the past two or three years, it was possible to find U.S. air
hardware in the skies over Colombia and Peru. The primary missions: helping
local authorities demolish the "air bridge" that links Andean coca crops to
laboratories in Colombia by locating and arresting traffickers, dynamiting
clandestine runways and trafficker hideouts and assisting in ambitious
crop-eradication projects.

A standard eradication mission--dozens are flown every year--includes more
than $100 million of American gear orbiting over hell and trying to make a
difference. So far, the missions have had little impact on overall
production. "People want it to be Desert Storm," says Bernard Aronson, the
senior State Department official for Latin America during the first Bush
Administration. "It's not. It is a long war of attrition.

There is progress over time. We just need the political will to sustain the
fight." And to swallow the hard realities of a slow war: a recent State
Department report notes that total overseas U.S. antidrug spending is about
$1.9 billion a year, or, as the report says, roughly the "street value of
19 metric tons of cocaine. The drug cartels have lost that much in a few
shipments and scarcely felt the loss."

Even if the U.S. were to decide to go all-out in the war on drugs, it is
unlikely that it would be able to get much traction: the countryside is
rough, stuffed with guerrilla fighters and lacking the fuel depots,
airfields and roads that a modern army needs. Giving Colombia five times
the resources would not make the cleanup go five times as fast. It would be
like giving your five-year-old a Sun workstation to do her math homework.

And no one in Washington wants U.S. soldiers drawn into a long jungle battle.

A State Department website on Colombia features as special link that
highlights the concern: "Why Colombia Is Not Vietnam. Click here."

One of the many reasons Bogota is not Saigon is that Congress has strictly
limited how many U.S. troops can be on the ground. The 300 U.S. trainers in
Colombia are handcuffed into training and escort missions only. U.S. drug
warriors in the region have had to reach elsewhere, into the shadowy world
of State Department contractors, to fill many jobs. It's an expensive decision.

Chopper and crop-spraying contract pilots can make $100,000 a year. And
because the U.S. doesn't want to send active-duty soldiers, the narcowars
have come to serve as a retirement plan for ex-U.S. military folks looking
for somewhere to put their skills to work. Military Professional Resources
Inc., of Alexandria, Va., recently wrapped up a yearlong, $6 million
mission to help organize and improve the Colombian military. That has made
some professional U.S. soldiers itchy. "The employment of private
corporations to provide military assistance, specifically the training of
other nations' armies to fight wars, should not be an instrument of U.S.
foreign policy," an Army colonel wrote in 1998. "The military profession
should remain a monopoly of the state."

That ambivalence has been reflected in a lively U.S. debate about whether
or not the country can endorse the policy of blasting apart the skyborne
narcodistribution system that sends pilots in small planes into Andean
skies day after day. The argument against the policy, first raised in the
early 1990s, was simple: it violated a fundamental precept of U.S. law
enforcement, that cops never shoot to kill unless lives are in danger.

Since both the U.S. military and the State Department felt bound by Supreme
Court rulings that it is unconstitutional to use lethal force against
fleeing felons, American planes couldn't directly support shoot-downs. To
many countries, the whole idea of shooting unarmed planes out of the sky
was so distasteful that they barred U.S. planes from flying overhead on
tracking missions altogether. U.S. officials say Venezuela's refusal to
grant overflight rights gobbles up 25% of the flight time of some
drug-hunting planes that have to fly around the nation as a result.

Says a dea planner involved in the debate: "We're supposed to export the
rule of law."

So U.S. planners came up with a fudge: U.S. planes would fly surveillance
missions but would carry "fly-along" officers from the local countries who
would manage the authorization of any actual gunfire. The division of labor
worked fine as a legal loophole, but it was an accident waiting to happen,
as the Peru shoot-down showed.

Here's what appears to have happened that Friday morning: moments after the
missionary plane lifted off the Amazon near the Colombian town of Leticia,
it registered on the radar screens of the CIA Citation Jet flying overhead.

Though the American pilot said he filed a flight plan the day before his
departure, Peruvian officials say they found none--often a tip-off for a
drug flight.

CIA contractors on board the jet alerted their Peruvian "fly-along"
officer, who scrambled a jet from an adjacent sector to take a look.
Meanwhile, the CIA now says, the U.S. contractors became increasingly
convinced that the plane was not a narcoflight. Their suspicions were
confirmed when they overheard the pilot talking to the Iquitos control tower.

They rushed to tell their Peruvian counterparts, but, the CIA says, it was
too late. "Don't shoot!

Tell him to terminate! No more!" the U.S. pilots yelled as they listened to
the Cessna pilot radio for help. But the very interpretation of the law
that prevented the contractors from giving a shoot-down order in the first
place now prevented them from canceling it. Peru disputes the CIA version,
saying the contractors didn't warn the Peruvian officer until after the
pilot opened fire. But though the flights are suspended for now, they are
likely to resume. "We need to learn from this," says Rodolfo Salinas
Rivera, who runs Peru's antidrug office. "But we can't let down our guard."

Keeping the air bridge shut down is a central part of the battle against
drugs. Colombia takes down nearly one plane a week, either through a
force-down or a shoot-down, and Peru has brought down at least 30 planes
since it adopted the shoot-down policy in 1992. "This method," says
Colombian Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez Acuna, "has been very
successful, and fortunately we haven't had anything to regret." But if the
policy has shattered the air bridge, the impact on coca exports has been
invisible.

Drug runners have simply shifted where they grow and how they transport
coca, moving from the air to the sea and rivers.

The success in reducing production in Bolivia and Peru has been offset by
the doubling of production in Colombia.

In drug-enforcement circles this is called the balloon effect: the air
moves, but the balloon never pops. Shoot down planes and smugglers start
using speedboats. Eradicate crops in Peru and growers move to Colombia. The
process undermines the whole interdiction effort.

But while the intensified antidrug efforts haven't affected the overall
size of the crops, they have changed the nature of the drug trade. "It is
totally different from 10 years ago," says Colombian Defense Minister
Ramirez Acuna. A decade ago, the trade was dominated by a few cartels.

Men like Pablo Escobar and Jorge Luis Ochoa ran multibillion-dollar
businesses that involved importing coca paste from Bolivia and Peru,
turning it into cocaine in Colombia and then exporting it to a hungry U.S.
market.

The efforts of the past decade have demolished that triangle. Aggressive
law enforcement led to the death of Escobar and the dismantling of the Cali
and Medellin cartels.

Air surveillance, force-downs and shoot-downs broke the air bridge.

And drug task forces have rolled up major wholesaling and distribution
networks.

Demand, alas, remained strong.

So production moved.

Today most cocaine is grown, processed and packaged in the Colombia jungle.

But instead of being controlled by a few master criminals, the production
is run by more than 100 small operations, each aligned with one of the
factions in Colombia's civil war. "Fighting the drugs," says Ramirez Acuna,
"has gone from being a criminal problem to a military one."

It is a nasty fight.

In the past decade, the civil war in Colombia has claimed more than 35,000
lives, often in brutal massacres. The war involves four parties: the
government, a Marxist movement known as the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia), a Cuban-inspired movement known as the ELN (National
Liberation Army) and an increasing number of paramilitary right-wingers
taking the antiguerrilla fight into their own hands.

The only groups that don't often fight each other are the FARC and the ELN.
But both the FARC rebels and the paramilitaries derive huge revenues by
"taxing" coca production in areas they control.

Last year alone, the FARC, the largest group, is estimated to have banked
$200 million to $400 million this way.

The Colombian strategy is to try to squeeze off the drug money as a way to
strangle the FARC and the ELN. Under the $7.5 billion Plan
Colombia--including $1.3 billion from Washington--the U.S. has been giving
Bogota choppers, training and advice on eradication. Some of the money will
arm three highly mobile, 1,000-member counternarcotics battalions able to
apply pressure to many parts of the country at once. Growers who are
tempted to move out from under spraying missions in the Putumayo region,
for instance, will find there's nowhere to run.

What worries U.S. planners most is how the FARC will react.

To begin with, say U.S. and Colombian officials, the rebels will probably
try to diversify their sources of revenue: which means more kidnappings and
crime.

But U.S. planners also think the FARC will try to hit back. Eradication
flights already come under gunfire from FARC units trying to protect crops
from spraying.

And the FARC might yet expand their counterattacks by trying to go after
Americans directly, hoping that enough body bags will scare the U.S. out of
the region.

One question you will constantly hear debated in Bogota is whether or not
the FARC has surface-to-air missiles.

With a multibillion-dollar bank account, it can clearly afford them. For
U.S. planners--and American contract pilots--it's a big worry.

It exposes the U.S. to a basic problem of policy: while U.S.-supplied
planes and their American-trained crews are allowed to get involved with
antidrug missions, they are not, by law, allowed anywhere near
counterinsurgency operations. Thus, for instance, the U.S. Blackhawks in
Plan Colombia can be used to hit FARC drug operations but not other FARC
offensives. It's a tough distinction to draw in the real-time world of combat.

Other countries in the region have reservations of their own. They fret
that FARC, ELN and the paramilitaries will begin looking for safe havens
outside Colombia. Two weekends ago, at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec
City, the Presidents of the nations surrounding Colombia told President
Bush that they are worried Plan Colombia will simply push drugs and
violence into their yards.

In response, the Bush Administration has been fine-tuning a wider Andes
plan, which would expand U.S. operations into all five countries.

The plan would be more than double the size of Plan Colombia and would
represent the largest escalation of the drug war to date.

Will it work? U.S. and Colombian officials insist that they are on the
verge of turning the corner in the war. But they have been saying that for
years, even as coca production has boomed.

The most pessimistic view of the expanded plan is that it will simply
militarize an even larger chunk of the hemisphere, creating war zones all
along Colombia's borders.

Even the legacy of the Amazon River shoot-down will simply be an adjustment
of procedures. No one seriously suggests letting the traffickers have the
skies back.

The most optimistic vision of what comes next is that with enough
pressure--and enough weapons--drug production can be brought to heel.
Aronson, State's top Latin America official in the first Bush
Administration with drug policy, points with guarded optimism to the battle
against the Mafia in America, For years, he notes, people knew the Mob in
New York City controlled everything from the docks to trucks, yet it
thrived openly. "Like the Colombians," he says, "first we went through a
period of denial.

Then we went through a period of dealing with it that was ineffective. Then
finally, through rico and some very tough prosecutors, we really learned
how to coordinate our efforts and make real progress." That's the good
news. The bad news is that it took decades.