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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The downing of a U.S. missionary plane over Peru raises questions about whether we can trust our drug-war allies -- and the families of soldiers who died in Colombia say the answer is no.
Apr 24, 2001 | The killing of Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity by Peruvian pilots who thought their Baptist missionary plane was part of a drug operation is just the latest tragedy to result from the controversial U.S.-backed drug war in the shadowy skies over the Andes.
Maybe the most mysterious aspect of the plane's downing Friday was the role of a CIA drug surveillance team, which first notified the Peruvians that the Baptists' plane was flying in airspace frequented by drug traffickers. Though the CIA team insists it warned the Peruvian officer who was riding along on the flight not to attack the plane without more information about its mission, the officer apparently gave the order for a nearby fighter jet to shoot at the single-engine Cessna.
Bowers and her daughter were killed by a single bullet; her husband Jim and son were rescued from the downed plane and survived, as did the pilot. Their distraught families are demanding answers from the U.S., which announced it would suspend such surveillance flights pending an investigation of the shooting.
"There was no communication," says Jim Bowers' older brother, Phil. "The planes flew by first, did some swooping, and then came in from behind and started shooting. Why didn't they call and check the registration?" he said. "Sounds like a bunch of vigilante, hotshot pilots. Either that or someone higher up ordered the pilots to shoot."
To some veterans of U.S. anti-drug operations in Colombia, and the families of those who have died there, such concerns about treachery will sound sadly familiar. A Salon investigation of several U.S. air units flying drug interdiction flights over Colombia shows American military personnel routinely worried about the trustworthiness of their local allies. They also complained of poor security, compromise of flight plans, and friction between U.S. military, CIA and local military personnel.
"It was bound to happen sooner or later," said a former U.S. Special Forces soldier who served on several anti-drug missions in the region, including in Colombia. While he was flying a counternarcotics mission out of Haiti in 1995, he said, his Blackhawk helicopter was nearly shot down by a Venezuelan fighter because the chopper pilot had forgotten to activate the onboard IFF -- the "friend or foe" signal that identifies the craft.
"Those guys are so trigger-happy, especially the fighter jocks. It doesn't matter whether they're from Peru, Colombia or wherever." He said it was "entirely possible" that a similar mix-up downed the Cessna in Peru.
But in Colombia, problems of coordination and communication are only part of the problem, veterans say. There is also evidence that Washington's host and ally in the Colombian drug war has been penetrated by the narcotics cartels. Pilots have complained that Colombian military personnel riding along on their surveillance flights notified drug traffickers of their whereabouts.
"In Vietnam, you called them Victor Charles, or Charlies," said a 26-year-old former U.S. Army Ranger who served as an advisor in Colombia in 1997, referring to the nickname for the Communist Viet Cong. "We call them 'Julios'" -- drug traffickers and their agents inside Colombia's military units.
There's no evidence -- yet -- of such betrayal in the Bowers case. But the tragedy highlights the high cost of the inter-American war on drugs. Its expansion under the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia will only continue to spread those risks to neighboring states like Peru, and ultimately, as the Bowers family painfully learned, to the U.S.
Charles Odom felt the drug war's sting in July 1999, when his wife Jennifer Odom's U.S. Army spy plane crashed in Colombia, killing her, four other U.S. crewmembers, and two Colombian military "ride-alongs."
"I'll always believe that plane was shot down, and now because of Peru, maybe we'll someday find out it was by one of our own," said Odom, himself a retired Army colonel. Odom has long theorized that a drug cartel, tipped off to the spy plane's movements by corrupt military personnel, was responsible for downing his wife's plane, because she was constantly taking ground fire and had often been "lit up" by missile radar when flying over the coca fields.
The Army insists that Jennifer Odom's four-prop Dehaviland-7 crashed into the Andes because the crew put faulty target coordinates into the onboard navigation computer. But her husband says the data was always provided by the U.S. Embassy in Bogota -- a view backed up by other members of her unit, the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion, based in El Paso, Texas.
Moreover Odom, who won two citations from the Drug Enforcement Agency for helping down suspected narcotics flights, also worried about the reliability of the Colombians who often ride along, her husband says.
So did former crewmember Briana Krueger, a U.S. Army intelligence specialist who, unlike Odom, lived to tell about it herself. But Krueger's husband Ray was not so lucky -- he perished along with Odom on the fateful July surveillance mission. Like Chuck Odom, Krueger believes her spouse lost his life because officials within the Colombian military -- and possibly even the U.S. military -- were collaborating with drug traffickers.
Ironically, the deaths of Odom and Krueger helped lead to expanded use of for-hire civilian contractors -- like the CIA-paid crew that first identified the Bowers' plane, incorrectly, as a drug-trafficking suspect -- in order to avoid more U.S. military casualties. But they have not led the U.S. military to admit that its Andean drug war, which has just claimed two more American lives, has spiraled out of its control.
