Pubdate: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 Source: Boston Globe (MA) Copyright: 2001 Globe Newspaper Company Contact: http://www.boston.com/globe/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth