Pubdate: Mon, 7 May 2001
Source: Time Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2001 Time Inc
Contact:  http://www.time.com/time/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/451
Author: Joshua Cooper Ramo, Iquitos

AMERICA'S SHADOW DRUG WAR

A Gruesome Shoot-down On The Amazon Hints At A Large And Growing U.S. 
Narcowar In Latin America. A Report From The Front Lines

Iquitos is the kind of town you might expect to read about in the pages of 
Joseph Conrad, tucked hard along the Amazon and alive with equal parts 
danger and promise.

It draws missionaries of all kind, zealots intent on changing the world by 
starting here. It was two such crusades--one to stop the narcotraffic that 
runs on this river and one that is trying to bring Jesus to its darkest 
corners--that collided 140 miles east of town April 20 when a Peruvian jet 
shot down an unarmed Cessna carrying missionaries back from an upriver stint.

The results were predictable: Roni Bowers, 35, and Charity, her 
seven-month-old daughter, killed by the gunfire that forced the crash 
landing of their plane.

The narcocrusaders are everywhere in this part of the world, as common here 
as the Internet entrepreneur seemed to be in the U.S. two years ago. Theirs 
is a growth business.

Everyone seems to be on one side of the game or the other--except those 
unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle.

Charts of coca production and the violence that goes along with 
it--kidnappings, massacres, executions--look like a NASDAQ chart from 1998. 
The jungles of Colombia and Peru and Bolivia are dotted with the 
paraphernalia buttressing a shadowy and bloody war: American radar systems, 
air bases and special-operations training units.

One of the things that astonished many Americans about the one-sided gun 
battle over the Amazon was the fact that a CIA jet had been working the 
skies, helping track the Cessna carrying Bowers and her baby. Though those 
flights were suspended last week as the U.S. investigated what had gone 
wrong, they are part of a significant U.S. presence in the region. On any 
given day in the past two or three years, it was possible to find U.S. air 
hardware in the skies over Colombia and Peru. The primary missions: helping 
local authorities demolish the "air bridge" that links Andean coca crops to 
laboratories in Colombia by locating and arresting traffickers, dynamiting 
clandestine runways and trafficker hideouts and assisting in ambitious 
crop-eradication projects.

A standard eradication mission--dozens are flown every year--includes more 
than $100 million of American gear orbiting over hell and trying to make a 
difference. So far, the missions have had little impact on overall 
production. "People want it to be Desert Storm," says Bernard Aronson, the 
senior State Department official for Latin America during the first Bush 
Administration. "It's not. It is a long war of attrition.

There is progress over time. We just need the political will to sustain the 
fight." And to swallow the hard realities of a slow war: a recent State 
Department report notes that total overseas U.S. antidrug spending is about 
$1.9 billion a year, or, as the report says, roughly the "street value of 
19 metric tons of cocaine. The drug cartels have lost that much in a few 
shipments and scarcely felt the loss."

Even if the U.S. were to decide to go all-out in the war on drugs, it is 
unlikely that it would be able to get much traction: the countryside is 
rough, stuffed with guerrilla fighters and lacking the fuel depots, 
airfields and roads that a modern army needs. Giving Colombia five times 
the resources would not make the cleanup go five times as fast. It would be 
like giving your five-year-old a Sun workstation to do her math homework.

And no one in Washington wants U.S. soldiers drawn into a long jungle battle.

A State Department website on Colombia features as special link that 
highlights the concern: "Why Colombia Is Not Vietnam. Click here."

One of the many reasons Bogota is not Saigon is that Congress has strictly 
limited how many U.S. troops can be on the ground. The 300 U.S. trainers in 
Colombia are handcuffed into training and escort missions only. U.S. drug 
warriors in the region have had to reach elsewhere, into the shadowy world 
of State Department contractors, to fill many jobs. It's an expensive decision.

Chopper and crop-spraying contract pilots can make $100,000 a year. And 
because the U.S. doesn't want to send active-duty soldiers, the narcowars 
have come to serve as a retirement plan for ex-U.S. military folks looking 
for somewhere to put their skills to work. Military Professional Resources 
Inc., of Alexandria, Va., recently wrapped up a yearlong, $6 million 
mission to help organize and improve the Colombian military. That has made 
some professional U.S. soldiers itchy. "The employment of private 
corporations to provide military assistance, specifically the training of 
other nations' armies to fight wars, should not be an instrument of U.S. 
foreign policy," an Army colonel wrote in 1998. "The military profession 
should remain a monopoly of the state."

That ambivalence has been reflected in a lively U.S. debate about whether 
or not the country can endorse the policy of blasting apart the skyborne 
narcodistribution system that sends pilots in small planes into Andean 
skies day after day. The argument against the policy, first raised in the 
early 1990s, was simple: it violated a fundamental precept of U.S. law 
enforcement, that cops never shoot to kill unless lives are in danger.

Since both the U.S. military and the State Department felt bound by Supreme 
Court rulings that it is unconstitutional to use lethal force against 
fleeing felons, American planes couldn't directly support shoot-downs. To 
many countries, the whole idea of shooting unarmed planes out of the sky 
was so distasteful that they barred U.S. planes from flying overhead on 
tracking missions altogether. U.S. officials say Venezuela's refusal to 
grant overflight rights gobbles up 25% of the flight time of some 
drug-hunting planes that have to fly around the nation as a result.

Says a dea planner involved in the debate: "We're supposed to export the 
rule of law."

So U.S. planners came up with a fudge: U.S. planes would fly surveillance 
missions but would carry "fly-along" officers from the local countries who 
would manage the authorization of any actual gunfire. The division of labor 
worked fine as a legal loophole, but it was an accident waiting to happen, 
as the Peru shoot-down showed.

Here's what appears to have happened that Friday morning: moments after the 
missionary plane lifted off the Amazon near the Colombian town of Leticia, 
it registered on the radar screens of the CIA Citation Jet flying overhead.

Though the American pilot said he filed a flight plan the day before his 
departure, Peruvian officials say they found none--often a tip-off for a 
drug flight.

CIA contractors on board the jet alerted their Peruvian "fly-along" 
officer, who scrambled a jet from an adjacent sector to take a look. 
Meanwhile, the CIA now says, the U.S. contractors became increasingly 
convinced that the plane was not a narcoflight. Their suspicions were 
confirmed when they overheard the pilot talking to the Iquitos control tower.

They rushed to tell their Peruvian counterparts, but, the CIA says, it was 
too late. "Don't shoot!

Tell him to terminate! No more!" the U.S. pilots yelled as they listened to 
the Cessna pilot radio for help. But the very interpretation of the law 
that prevented the contractors from giving a shoot-down order in the first 
place now prevented them from canceling it. Peru disputes the CIA version, 
saying the contractors didn't warn the Peruvian officer until after the 
pilot opened fire. But though the flights are suspended for now, they are 
likely to resume. "We need to learn from this," says Rodolfo Salinas 
Rivera, who runs Peru's antidrug office. "But we can't let down our guard."

Keeping the air bridge shut down is a central part of the battle against 
drugs. Colombia takes down nearly one plane a week, either through a 
force-down or a shoot-down, and Peru has brought down at least 30 planes 
since it adopted the shoot-down policy in 1992. "This method," says 
Colombian Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez Acuna, "has been very 
successful, and fortunately we haven't had anything to regret." But if the 
policy has shattered the air bridge, the impact on coca exports has been 
invisible.

Drug runners have simply shifted where they grow and how they transport 
coca, moving from the air to the sea and rivers.

The success in reducing production in Bolivia and Peru has been offset by 
the doubling of production in Colombia.

In drug-enforcement circles this is called the balloon effect: the air 
moves, but the balloon never pops. Shoot down planes and smugglers start 
using speedboats. Eradicate crops in Peru and growers move to Colombia. The 
process undermines the whole interdiction effort.

But while the intensified antidrug efforts haven't affected the overall 
size of the crops, they have changed the nature of the drug trade. "It is 
totally different from 10 years ago," says Colombian Defense Minister 
Ramirez Acuna. A decade ago, the trade was dominated by a few cartels.

Men like Pablo Escobar and Jorge Luis Ochoa ran multibillion-dollar 
businesses that involved importing coca paste from Bolivia and Peru, 
turning it into cocaine in Colombia and then exporting it to a hungry U.S. 
market.

The efforts of the past decade have demolished that triangle. Aggressive 
law enforcement led to the death of Escobar and the dismantling of the Cali 
and Medellin cartels.

Air surveillance, force-downs and shoot-downs broke the air bridge.

And drug task forces have rolled up major wholesaling and distribution 
networks.

Demand, alas, remained strong.

So production moved.

Today most cocaine is grown, processed and packaged in the Colombia jungle.

But instead of being controlled by a few master criminals, the production 
is run by more than 100 small operations, each aligned with one of the 
factions in Colombia's civil war. "Fighting the drugs," says Ramirez Acuna, 
"has gone from being a criminal problem to a military one."

It is a nasty fight.

In the past decade, the civil war in Colombia has claimed more than 35,000 
lives, often in brutal massacres. The war involves four parties: the 
government, a Marxist movement known as the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed 
Forces of Colombia), a Cuban-inspired movement known as the ELN (National 
Liberation Army) and an increasing number of paramilitary right-wingers 
taking the antiguerrilla fight into their own hands.

The only groups that don't often fight each other are the FARC and the ELN. 
But both the FARC rebels and the paramilitaries derive huge revenues by 
"taxing" coca production in areas they control.

Last year alone, the FARC, the largest group, is estimated to have banked 
$200 million to $400 million this way.

The Colombian strategy is to try to squeeze off the drug money as a way to 
strangle the FARC and the ELN. Under the $7.5 billion Plan 
Colombia--including $1.3 billion from Washington--the U.S. has been giving 
Bogota choppers, training and advice on eradication. Some of the money will 
arm three highly mobile, 1,000-member counternarcotics battalions able to 
apply pressure to many parts of the country at once. Growers who are 
tempted to move out from under spraying missions in the Putumayo region, 
for instance, will find there's nowhere to run.

What worries U.S. planners most is how the FARC will react.

To begin with, say U.S. and Colombian officials, the rebels will probably 
try to diversify their sources of revenue: which means more kidnappings and 
crime.

But U.S. planners also think the FARC will try to hit back. Eradication 
flights already come under gunfire from FARC units trying to protect crops 
from spraying.

And the FARC might yet expand their counterattacks by trying to go after 
Americans directly, hoping that enough body bags will scare the U.S. out of 
the region.

One question you will constantly hear debated in Bogota is whether or not 
the FARC has surface-to-air missiles.

With a multibillion-dollar bank account, it can clearly afford them. For 
U.S. planners--and American contract pilots--it's a big worry.

It exposes the U.S. to a basic problem of policy: while U.S.-supplied 
planes and their American-trained crews are allowed to get involved with 
antidrug missions, they are not, by law, allowed anywhere near 
counterinsurgency operations. Thus, for instance, the U.S. Blackhawks in 
Plan Colombia can be used to hit FARC drug operations but not other FARC 
offensives. It's a tough distinction to draw in the real-time world of combat.

Other countries in the region have reservations of their own. They fret 
that FARC, ELN and the paramilitaries will begin looking for safe havens 
outside Colombia. Two weekends ago, at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec 
City, the Presidents of the nations surrounding Colombia told President 
Bush that they are worried Plan Colombia will simply push drugs and 
violence into their yards.

In response, the Bush Administration has been fine-tuning a wider Andes 
plan, which would expand U.S. operations into all five countries.

The plan would be more than double the size of Plan Colombia and would 
represent the largest escalation of the drug war to date.

Will it work? U.S. and Colombian officials insist that they are on the 
verge of turning the corner in the war. But they have been saying that for 
years, even as coca production has boomed.

The most pessimistic view of the expanded plan is that it will simply 
militarize an even larger chunk of the hemisphere, creating war zones all 
along Colombia's borders.

Even the legacy of the Amazon River shoot-down will simply be an adjustment 
of procedures. No one seriously suggests letting the traffickers have the 
skies back.

The most optimistic vision of what comes next is that with enough 
pressure--and enough weapons--drug production can be brought to heel. 
Aronson, State's top Latin America official in the first Bush 
Administration with drug policy, points with guarded optimism to the battle 
against the Mafia in America, For years, he notes, people knew the Mob in 
New York City controlled everything from the docks to trucks, yet it 
thrived openly. "Like the Colombians," he says, "first we went through a 
period of denial.

Then we went through a period of dealing with it that was ineffective. Then 
finally, through rico and some very tough prosecutors, we really learned 
how to coordinate our efforts and make real progress." That's the good 
news. The bad news is that it took decades.
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