THE PLANE TRUTH IN PERU

The killing of a missionary woman and her baby in a plane shot down Friday
by the Peruvian Air Force must be investigated properly. So far, survivors
of the attack and relatives of the victims have only heard contradictory
accounts of what happened and why.

If credible explanations are found for this loss of innocent lives, there
will still be a need to see this particular lethal episode in the context
of America's overly militaristic concept of how to wage war on illegal
narcotics.

What is clear about the downing of the missionaries' plane is that it was
mistaken for a drug traffickers' plane and that some or all of the parties
involved in that tragic attack are lying about their roles.

If the promised investigations of the incident are to be worthwhile, they
will have to provide honest answers to questions about the role of the CIA
plane that first notified the Peruvian Air Force about the missionaries.
Did the agency's contract employees on the surveillance plane truly express
reservations about the Peruvian Air Force's haste to treat the missionaries
from the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism as drug runners?

Other crucial questions: Did the suspect plane file a flight plan with the
airport control tower in Iquitos, the site in the Amazon jungle to which
the plane was headed? Did the Peruvian Air Force pilots in the attacking
fighter jet follow correct international rules for identifying and warning
the plane they shot down?

One plausible explanation for the manner in which the Peruvian pilots fired
at the missionaries was that the two planes were trying to communicate on
different radio frequencies, as the director of aviation for the
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism has said. If this was the
case, then both the Peruvian military authorities and their American
overseers need to explain how such an oversight was possible.

Whatever explanations are forthcoming for this terrible incident, Americans
are entitled to ask whether this example of so-called "collateral damage"
in the militarized war on drugs is representative of a more generalized
US-inspired propensity for pointless violence against innocent people.

Washington has spent $25 billion in the past decade in usually futile
efforts to eradicate coca crops and interdict traffickers. As a result, the
illicit crops were reduced in Bolivia and in Peru but sprang up in greater
profusion in areas of Colombia. When those areas were fumigated from the
air, in a program planned and financed by the United States, peasants saw
their legal crops destroyed, the health of their children compromised, and
their livelihoods destroyed. They, like the mother and child shot down on
their plane last Friday, have become unintended victims of an endless,
costly war on drugs.