PUNO, Peru, May 28 -- As the former president Alan Garcia campaigned across the Andean highlands, there were flashes of his old populist allure. Aymara and Quechua Indian women herders abandoned their llamas to run and touch him. People poured confetti into his hair and draped him with flowers as his caravan stopped in little towns. Defying the thin mountain air with a few gulps of coca tea, Mr. Garcia rode a bicycle through the streets of one town and danced a torrid huayno with a young Quechua woman in another. [continues 1072 words]
LIMA, Peru, May 25 - The two presidential candidates competing to succeed the ousted President Alberto K. Fujimori have begun a gentle assault on the traditional third force in Peruvian politics - the bloated and politically powerful armed forces - as the military has sunk in prestige after an array of scandals. The military tied its fortunes to the 10-year Fujimori rule, and when that collapsed and the former president fled to Japan late last year, so the officers' fortunes sank too. During the last several months, 18 generals and admirals have been arrested on charges ranging from leading a paramilitary death squad to accepting bribes from drug traffickers and taking kickbacks from purchases of a squadron of overpriced and obsolete MIG-29 fighter jets. [continues 967 words]
LIMA, Peru -- In the only scheduled debate before Peru's presidential runoff next month, front-runner Alejandro Toledo focused on former President Alan Garcia's disastrous term in office and Garcia accused Toledo of using cocaine. The televised exchange Saturday night offered Peruvians a chance to see how Toledo, widely viewed as erratic and prone to contradict himself, measured up against Garcia, who is considered one of Latin America's great orators but whose 1985-90 term ended with the country in economic ruin. [continues 277 words]
LIMA, Peru, May 20 - Facing an uphill battle to regain the presidency, former President Alan Garcia has tied his opponent, Alejandro Toledo, to the use of cocaine. In a televised debate on Saturday night, Mr. Garcia said: "Nobody has ever charged me with consuming cocaine. A consumer of cocaine cannot be the leader of a country." He a was referring to published reports that Mr. Toledo, a former business professor and World Bank official, had tested positive for cocaine during a hospital visit in 1998 on the same day he was reportedly consorting with three women. [continues 559 words]
Perils Of Partnership: The Generals Reminisce LIMA: Inside a dilapidated central prison, a gaggle of former President Alberto Fujimori's top generals sulked around a green concrete jail yard on a hot afternoon. The recently arrested generals whittled away their recreation time halfheartedly, playing soccer and reminiscing about the days when Mr. Fujimori's finest could count on at least one steadfast friend: Uncle Sam. General Juan Miguel del Aguila, head of Peru's National Anti-terrorism Bureau until last year and, later, the security chief of the National Police, recalled frequent meetings with American intelligence agents right up to the moment when Mr. Fujimori abandoned the presidency and fled to Japan in November. [continues 1217 words]
WASHINGTON- U.S. and Peruvian investigators are exploring whether a series of errors, rather than a single blunder, led to the mistaken downing of an American missionaries' plane over Peru, one of the investigators says. The investigator also hinted at evidence the Peruvian military jet likely fired a required warning shot before downing the single-engine Cessna it suspected was carrying drugs. One of the missionaries and her child were killed in the April 20 incident. "There were several contributing factors that tragically conspired" leading up to the fatal attack, said the investigator. [continues 630 words]
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. and Peruvian investigators are exploring whether a series of errors, rather than a single blunder, led to the mistaken downing of an American missionaries' plane over Peru, one of the investigators says. The investigator also hinted at evidence the Peruvian military jet likely fired a required warning shot before downing the single-engine Cessna it suspected was carrying drugs. One of the missionaries and her child were killed in the April 20 incident. " There were several contributing factors that tragically conspired" leading up to the fatal attack, said the investigator. [continues 630 words]
Arrests Of Peruvian Officials Expose Corruption, Deceit LIMA, Peru -- Inside a dilapidated downtown prison, a gaggle of former president Alberto Fujimori's top generals sulked around a green cement jail yard on a hot afternoon. The recently arrested generals whittled away their recreation time halfheartedly, playing soccer and reminiscing about the days when Fujimori's finest could count on at least one steadfast friend: Uncle Sam. Gen. Juan Miguel del Aguila, head of Peru's National Anti-terrorism Bureau until last year and, later, security chief of the National Police, recalled frequent meetings with U.S. intelligence agents right up to the moment when Fujimori abandoned the presidency and fled to Japan in November. [continues 1526 words]
LIMA, Peru -- Colombian President Andres Pastrana on Monday met with Peruvian presidential hopeful Alejandro Toledo, as part of a three-day official visit here aimed at strengthening political and commercial ties between the neighboring Latin American nations. The two spoke for 50 minutes on the struggle against illegal drug trafficking, terrorism and trade at Pastrana's hotel El Olivar, located in the capital's affluent San Isidro neighborhood. Toledo arrived at the meeting accompanied by his wife Eliane Karp and members of his campaign team. [continues 131 words]
For Jim and Roni Bowers, the plane ride high above the Amazon River was a welcome respite from their rewarding but rigorous life as missionaries. They'd gone to the border town of Leticia, Colombia, with their 6-year-old son, Cory, to get a Peruvian visa for their newly adopted daughter, 7-month-old Charity. And now they were enjoying a breathtaking view of the rain-forest canopy during a three-hour return trip to their mission base in Iquitos, Peru. For days Jim had been happily anticipating the opportunity to gaze down upon the 56 villages where he had been spreading the Gospel by houseboat. "I'll get a better feel for how they're situated and their full size and location on the river," he e-mailed a friend, Pastor Terry Fulk, back in Fruitport, Mich. He was just where he wanted to be--in the copilot's seat at 4,000 feet, feeding his infant daughter Cheerios. But as he looked out the window to his right, Bowers got a start. There, flying below him on the right side of the Cessna 185, was a Peruvian fighter jet. [continues 1840 words]
In the world of drugs and thugs, brutality works. That's why Peru's policy of blasting drug flights out of the sky has been hailed as that nation's single most effective counterdrug tactic. Since 1995, Peruvian Air Force jets have strafed or forced down more than 30 narcotics-laden airplanes. Narco flights, not surprisingly, have fallen off dramatically. So has Peruvian coca production. But all that meant little to the Bowers family of Muskegon, Mich. On April 20, they were flying in an area known to U.S. intelligence as the Dog's Head. That's where the borders of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia come together. The Bowerses were en route to a missionary project in Iquitos, Peru. After their Cessna 185 re-entered Peru, a Peruvian Air Force fighter jet suddenly began spraying them with bullets. Aboard a surveillance aircraft operated by the CIA--which had first detected the Bowerses' Cessna and passed the info on to the Peruvians--the American pilots were alarmed by the attack. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" shouted one pilot into his radio. By then it was too late. Veronica Bowers, 35, and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, were already dead. [continues 202 words]
Missionary worker Jim Bowers peered uneasily out the front passenger window of a Cessna 185 floatplane. To his right: a Peruvian air force fighter jet. It had been tailing the Cessna for about 15 minutes. Suddenly, there was a puff of smoke from the fighter. Bullets pierced the missionary plane in machine-gun fashion. The jet flew under the Cessna, reappeared on its left and fired again. A bullet hit the Cessna's left wing, where fuel was stored. A fire erupted and rushed through the fuel line into the plane. Flames shot up from the floor of the cockpit, engulfing pilot Kevin Donaldson's feet. A bullet struck his right leg, shattering two bones. [continues 2087 words]
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. [continues 2376 words]
Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET, WASHINGTON (AP) -- It was brutal, but effective. Peru's president ordered drug planes blown out of the sky to stop the flights of semiprocessed cocaine from his country to Colombia in the early 1990s. As a result, Peru's production of coca, the raw material for cocaine, has dropped steadily. But following the fatal attack April 20 on an American missionary plane in Peru, the policy is on hold. Some worry the drug flights will resume; drug policy analysts are not so sure. [continues 701 words]
Control, Standards Conceded LIMA, Peru, - Crisscrossing Peru's eastern jungle, U.S.-Peruvian air patrols for the last six years have attacked low-flying planes trying to smuggle coca paste to the cocaine production and distribution networks of Colombia's drug lords to the north. The cooperative missions have been hailed as the most successful tactic so far in America's war on drugs. But the mistaken downing of a small plane carrying American missionaries on April 20, which killed a woman and her infant daughter, has suddenly thrust into the limelight the flaws, pitfalls and risks that go along with such missions. In the life-or-death decisions being made here using information from U.S. radar and intelligence planes -- often transmitted across a language gap -- the United States has given up a significant amount of control over tactics and accountability. At the same time, it has forged an alliance with a military and government leadership long rife with corruption, sacrificing safeguards and legal standards it would be held to at home. [continues 2158 words]
Critics Say Private Military Contractors On Anti-Drug And Other Missions Are Not Held Accountable. More than a week after a small plane was shot down over Peru, killing an American missionary and her baby, the tragedy remains rife with questions. Among them: Exactly who was on board the surveillance plane that targeted the civilian flight? Were they employees of DynCorp, a major CIA contractor? Or were they employees of yet another company, with even less accountability to Congress and the American public? [continues 971 words]
In Latin America, Foes Aren't the Only Danger WHEN the fighter pilot's fire ripped through a plane carrying an American missionary family over Peru last week, the bullet holes opened up ironic points of light into American foreign policy in Latin America. "Know your enemy and know yourself; in 100 battles you will never be in peril," Sun Tzu wrote in "The Art of War." In Latin America, though, it is its friends and allies that the United States does not seem to want to know too well. Today, particularly where the drug war rages, it finds itself, as it has so often in the past, in the awkward position of an arm's-length embrace. [continues 1456 words]
IQUITOS, Peru, April 27 Missionaries say there are many souls to be saved along the Amazon, where the people often drink away their money and live by superstitious beliefs that include a myth that unwanted pregnancies are the work of the feared river dolphins. But as the Adams and Mortimer families glided up the brown waters on their way to this jungle city for a memorial service for one of their best friends, there was little time for these American missionaries from Michigan and Oklahoma to evangelize. [continues 1028 words]
Your story "U.S. plane aided Peru jets' attack on missionaries" caught my attention (Times, April 22). I am left with a big question, the possible answers to which are unsavory. If the practice of shooting down unarmed civilian planes was deemed a violation of international and U.S. law by the Justice Department and the Pentagon, why are we still killing people? Is it because we don't mind if innocent Peruvians are killed? President Bush is "upset by the fact that two American citizens lost their lives." Obviously, previous executions by fighter jets in Peru and who knows what other countries have been acceptable, as long as the untried suspects were not American. [continues 130 words]
Drug Wars, Rebels Hard On Missions NEW YORK--The recent missionary deaths in Peru underscore the escalating risks that confront Protestant missionaries in remote areas of Latin America beset by guerrilla warfare and drug trafficking. Veronica "Roni" Bowers and her infant daughter Charity were killed April 20, not by criminals but by military forces targeting criminals that mistakenly shot down a missionary airplane. Most experts agree that security is an increasing concern for the 10,700 U.S. Protestant missionaries working in Latin America. Particularly since World War II, Protestants have moved into remote terrain where the main danger used to be medical problems. [continues 575 words]
Inside Peru
