PERU'S RECKLESS SHOOTING

It should not have taken the tragic deaths of two innocent members of an
American missionary family to force Washington to re-examine its
cooperation with Peru's risky drug interdiction program. Although the facts
of last Friday's incident are still being sorted out, the deaths raise
serious questions about how Peru's air force has been carrying out a
program involving help from the Central Intelligence Agency to fight drug
trafficking. The White House is right to suspend the program's operations
until it can be sure more reliable controls are in place.

The official rules of engagement are designed to safeguard against mistaken
identifications. They are also meant to compel drug trafficking planes to
land rather than shooting them out of the sky. But Peru's record suggests a
preference for more aggressive tactics. Several years before this program
began, Peruvian jet fighter planes fired on a United States military
transport, killing an American airman. Some 30 aircraft have been shot down
during the six years of the joint program, although this is apparently the
first time that American civilians have been killed. While the program is
suspended, President Bush should ask for a review of the previous shooting
incidents.

Peru's pugnacious attitude seems to have been a critical factor on Friday.
Americans working for the C.I.A. spotted an unknown aircraft flying through
a zone frequented by drug traffickers and relayed the information to the
Peruvian military. The Peruvian fighter pilot sent up to investigate
apparently ignored precautions designed to prevent mistaken identifications
and opened fire on the suspected plane, forcing it to crash-land in the
Amazon jungle.

The joint drug interdiction program, authorized by Congress in 1994, was
designed to discourage the growing of coca leaf in Peru by making it more
difficult to bring the product to market. The program has resulted in a
nearly two-thirds drop in coca production in Peru since 1995. Much of that
lost output simply moved to Colombia, and in recent years new marketing
channels have opened up in Peru, relying on rivers and roads rather than
the skies. But there is little question that fear of aerial interdiction
has been a significant constraint on Peruvian drug production.

Unfortunately, for most of the life of this program, military cooperation
with Peru meant cooperation with its autocratic former president, Alberto
Fujimori, and his corrupt intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos. Both
men have now been evicted from power, and senior military commanders from
that era have been replaced. But the aggressive approach they favored
apparently remains. If cooperative drug interdiction can be resumed without
continuing risk to innocent fliers, it should be. But until it can be
certain that Peruvian pilots will not shoot first and ask questions later,
Washington should keep the program in suspension and under an unbiased review.