SHOOT-DOWN HIGHLIGHTS

Last week, drug-plane spotters detected a Cessna flying over the
jungle. A fighter jet clashed with the small plane and forced it down.

But this was a different plane from the one that carried Veronica
Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity. They died Friday when a
hasty Peruvian pilot mistook their Cessna for a drug trafficker's
plane. The other plane, forced down Saturday in Colombia, was carrying
Luis Fernando da Costa, Brazil's biggest drug lord. He fled the
demolished plane and was captured days later by Colombian troops,
supported by three U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopters.

In back-to-back episodes, the shoot-down policy had its most tragic
and then one of its most successful outcomes. Success, however, is
hard to define. Peru has downed 30 planes in five years and reduced
cultivated coca from 319,000 acres in 1992 to an estimated 84,500
acres in 2000. But much of that production simply has shifted to
Colombia, which has not been as aggressive -- one reason da Costa was
there.

For now, the most important questions surrounding the Peru shoot-down
are procedural. Did U.S. spotters try to stop it? Cockpit audio and
video tapes said to back up their claim must be released. What new
safeguards can reduce the possibility of downing another civilian
plane? The response needs to be more thorough than it was in 1994,
when the Clinton administration briefly suspended drug-spotting
assistance to Peru and Colombia because of concerns that American
personnel could be held criminally liable for civilian deaths.
Congress "fixed" that problem by granting Americans immunity.

Beyond the short term, the deaths of Veronica and Charity Bowers pose
larger questions about the increasingly militaristic methods of
countering drug trafficking. U.S. crew members on the spotter plane in
Peru were "CIA contract workers." The Pentagon supplied the plane. The
Customs Service might have had a role. The agency mix and indistinct
lines of authority chill anyone who remembers Iran-Contra and a litany
of other misadventures.

With $3 billion worth of American weapons and an indefinite number of
"advisers" going to help Colombia fight a politico/narco war against
rebel groups and right-wing militias, the scenarios just get scarier.
The U.S. crew could not control events in Peru. Can U.S. advisers
control how Colombia's military uses its new weapons? If they can't,
might American troops be drawn into a more direct role?

Civilians account for many of the 3,000 civil war victims who die each
year in Colombia. But the casualties are more widespread. Veronica and
Charity Bowers are innocent victims of a conflict that reaches from
the Amazon to the streets of South Florida, New York and San
Francisco. Success means reducing the number of victims. With U.S.
support, Colombia is waging an escalated war on drugs. The shoot-down
in Peru is a small indication of how risky that strategy is, how many
safeguards it needs and how much more the nation must do at home to
reduce demand.