U.S. MAY RESTART DRUG-PLANE INTERDICTION IN AMAZON

It Stopped After Missionary Was Shot Down In Peru In April.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government is "pretty close" to resuming a suspended
program to shoot down suspected drug planes in the Amazon, White House drug
czar John Walters says.

Walters said U.S. officials may want to renew the program first in
Colombia, then later in Peru, where a tragic accidental shoot-down over the
Amazon River on April 20 killed a U.S. missionary and her infant daughter.

That fatal mishap forced the suspension of the program and led to at least
two official U.S. investigations and a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

"We're pretty close, I think, to deciding within the U.S. government about
how we'd like to proceed," Walters said.

Peru is one of the nations President George W. Bush will visit during a
Latin American tour next week, and expectations are high in Lima of
imminent renewal of the U.S.-designed strategy begun in 1994 to shoot down
aircraft suspected of carrying coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine. "We
have been informed by the administration that this matter is in a very
advanced state of consideration," Peru's ambassador to Washington, Allan
Wagner, said Friday. "We hope that this will be accomplished by the time
President Bush is in Lima."

Coca crops are expanding in both Peru and Colombia, and some conservative
U.S. legislators are pressing the White House to take more aggressive action.

Safeguards built into the U.S.-sponsored shoot-down program eroded with
time, making an accident almost inevitable, Senate Intelligence Committee
investigators found in October.

The panel's report called for a "dramatic overhaul" and said the program
was marred by language barriers, inadequate radio systems and failure to
alert suspicious pilots that they were about to be shot out of the sky.

It also demanded that the CIA not be involved in future drug-plane
interdictions.