Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Why did the Peruvian military shoot down a plane full of innocent people -- and why was the CIA involved?
Apr 24, 2001 | The place where Colombia, Peru and Ecuador come together is the greatest cocaine-trafficking air corridor in the world. Small aircraft regularly fly coca paste across the Andes Mountains from Peru.
That's why a CIA plane, contracted to do intelligence as part of a drug interdiction operation with the Peruvian government, suspected on Friday that a small Cessna carrying a family of Baptist missionaries was running drugs.
According to statements by a U.S. intelligence official, the three-person U.S. surveillance crew, who were civilian contract employees of the CIA, informed a Peruvian A-37 fighter jet on patrol about its suspicions, but asked it to check its identity before taking any action. The U.S. crew communicated only with the Peruvian air force liaison on board the surveillance plane. By agreement, U.S. personnel are not in the Peruvian chain of command and have no authority to control their actions. Despite the American objections, the Peruvian officer on board the CIA plane instructed the jet crew to fire on the suspicious Cessna, according to the official.
Many questions still linger about what exactly led to the fatal events. But onlookers say that they saw the jet fire machine-gun rounds into the Cessna, and watched the tiny plane crash into the river. Though Peruvian onlookers were able to rescue the Cessna's pilot from the water, Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, had already been killed -- according to reports, a single bullet passed through the child's skull as she sat in her mother's lap, then entered the mother's body.
Why did they die, and what could have prevented this terrible event? Very few questions have been answered at this point, and it will likely be weeks before an investigation can offer the public more information.
Contributing to the confusion is the fact that drug interdiction flights, like all of our military anti-narcotics operations in Latin America, are secretive and complex. They involve not only the military operations of the home governments, which themselves lack transparency, but an elaborate system of U.S. foreign aid from a variety of agencies, including the departments of Defense and State, the U.S. Customs Service, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency, which provide host nations with military training, equipment and intelligence. Making matters even murkier is the presence of numerous American mercenaries, hired as freelance pilots, ground crews and intelligence personnel by both the host nations and the United States.
In the past five years, Peru has reportedly shot down roughly 30 planes it suspected of drug running, and grounded many more. Coca cultivation in the Andean nation has fallen by as much as 60 percent as a result of joint U.S.-Peru anti-drug efforts, whose main focus is air interception, the U.S. administration said.
On Monday, the Bush administration ordered U.S. surveillance flights suspended pending an official investigation. But, anxious to avoid jeopardizing an interdiction program that has been, at least in its immediate region, a rare success, the administration downplayed the event, acknowledging that it was a "tragic error" but calling it an "isolated incident." The administration stopped short of blaming the Peruvian government, but said its military failed to follow proper rules of engagement, and that it acted too hastily by firing against the plane.
The Peruvian military denied any wrongdoing, saying it followed proper procedure -- leaving unanswered the question of how a procedure could be "proper" that resulted in the death of innocent civilians.
The Bowers tragedy throws a spotlight on the $48 million in narcotics control aid that the U.S. government gave to Peru last year, as well as the $32 million that came as part of Plan Colombia, the military anti-narcotics campaign implemented last year in Andean drug-producing nations. It is certain to lead to hard questions about the viability of American participation in the interdiction program -- questions concerning not just the competence of America's military partners in the region but the sprawling, internecine war on coca production itself, a war critics charge is unwinnable. Despite the fact that coca production in Peru has dropped, coca production in the region as a whole has increased, as growers pressured out of Peru have moved into Colombia.
Salon asked Adam Isacson, a senior associate at Washington's Center for International Policy, what this tragedy can tell us about our involvement in the drug war.
Is Peru the only government that has a policy to shoot down planes involved in drug trafficking? And what is the role of the U.S. in that policy?
