A TRAGEDY IN PERU

Who's at fault for downing missionaries' plane?

CHALK up two more casualties in the drug wars. In an incident in Peru last
week, an American missionary and her 7-month-old daughter died when
Peruvian air force pilots opened fire on a Cessna they suspected was being
used to smuggle drugs.

The crew of a nearby U.S. surveillance plane repeatedly told the Peruvians
to hold fire, to no avail -- but the truth in this tragedy remains murky at
best.

President Bush rightly suspended the U.S. surveillance flights until the
tragic incident has been thoroughly investigated. Judging from the widely
disparate accounts of what happened, there will be plenty to investigate.
The review must be exhaustive, and it must lead to changes in military
procedure that drastically reduce the chances of this sort of deadly
miscommunication.

The Peruvians say the missionaries' plane had failed to file a flight plan
in a region where drug traffickers abound. The Peruvians also say their
pilots opened fire on the small, single-engine Cessna only after it refused
to follow in-air directives to land.

Relatives of James Bowers, who was on the plane with his wife, Veronica,
and baby daughter, Charity, when it was attacked, said he had told them
that the Peruvian pilots did not try to communicate with the plane before
opening fire.

What's more, after the Cessna crash-landed in a river, the Peruvian pilots
allegedly swooped by and strafed the survivors as they held onto wreckage.
The crew of the American tracking plane that had been involved in efforts
to identify the missionaries' plane said it had warned the Peruvians
repeatedly not to intercept the unidentified plane.

Ironically, in 1995, when the Peruvian air force started aggressively going
after civilian planes suspected of drug-smuggling, the United States
stopped helping the Peruvians track and identify suspicious civilian
planes, for fear that Americans would be blamed if innocent civilians were
inadvertently killed. But Congress then passed a law that allowed the
United States to help other countries fight drug-trafficking only after
appropriate procedures had been implemented to reduce the risk of innocent
loss of life.

Clearly, those procedures desperately need to be overhauled -- and enforced.