‘You Fly, You Die’ Approach to Drug War Faces Scrutiny

BUENOS AIRES —  Anti-drug warriors involved in a U.S.-Peruvian airborne interdiction effort that has slashed the South American nation’s cocaine production had a warning for smugglers: “You fly, you die.”

That warlike motto governed the zone of low-intensity conflict into which a Cessna seaplane carrying U.S. Baptist missionaries flew last week with disastrous results: A Peruvian air force jet assisted by a CIA surveillance plane mistakenly shot down the Cessna, killing a woman and her infant daughter.

The shoot-down policy will get thorough scrutiny from a team of investigators from the CIA, National Transportation Safety Board, Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. agencies who are expected in the coming days in Lima, the Peruvian capital. The U.S. has suspended its aerial interdiction operations in Peru.

“Smuggling flights are going to get through now, but that’s the price you pay,” said a former official with the U.S. Embassy in Lima. “It’s critical they get the answer to why this happened and make sure it’s never repeated. But I don’t think they’ll kill the shoot-down policy: It’s a national security question.”

Friday’s incident was the first in which innocent parties were harmed during the 8-year-old air interdiction program, according to U.S. officials. And former U.S. Embassy officials say the safeguards they built into the aerial operations contributed to a success story in the war on drugs in the Andean region.

The numbers are impressive. Peru has reduced cultivation of the coca plant by about 70% since 1995. The drop resulted from eradication efforts on the ground combined with the offensive on smugglers who fly coca paste into Colombia, where it is refined into cocaine and smuggled to the United States and Europe.

The joint effort in Peru disrupted coca production, drove up coca prices and served as a general deterrent, as exemplified by this underworld market indicator: In the early 1990s, smuggling pilots charged $30,000 per flight into the nation. After the Peruvian air force interceptions began, the fee jumped to $180,000--in advance.

There has been similar progress in Bolivia, one of the two other major countries that grow coca in the region. A militarized ground campaign to eradicate coca there has reduced cultivation by about 70%--and even more in the key growing area that supplies drug traffickers.

Colombian traffickers reacted to the woes of Peruvian and Bolivian coca suppliers by stepping up production at home. The estimated area of cultivation, concentrated largely in regions controlled by the well-armed guerrillas of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, has more than quadrupled since 1993.

And success in Peru came at a cost. As the regime of President Alberto Fujimori and his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, drifted into authoritarianism in the 1990s, it retained U.S. support largely because of its anti-drug performance.

That weakened Peruvian institutions, leading inevitably to the crisis that toppled both men, critics say. And the priorities of the drug war turned the U.S. national security apparatus into a shadow that hovers over most important events in Peru--including Friday’s tragedy.

So far, the CIA has made a convincing and specific case that its contract employees aboard the surveillance plane urged Peruvian air force officers to refrain from firing on the missionaries’ aircraft, which U.S. radar operators had detected and identified as suspicious.

Moreover, if established procedures were followed, the final decision to open fire was made by a Peruvian general on the ground.

Still, the CIA’s role reminds Peruvians of the agency’s longtime influence in their nation, according to critics.

“A great deal of what happened in Peru in these years was resolved in negotiations with the U.S. Embassy and especially with the CIA,” said Carlos Tapia, a Peruvian political analyst.

Early in the Fujimori years, the relationship with the U.S. reached a low point after an alarming episode that demonstrated the Peruvian air force’s potential for aggressiveness.

In 1992, two Soviet-made Peruvian fighter jets fired on a U.S. Air Force transport plane that was on a mission to photograph illegal coca plantations, killing a crew member and wounding two others.

That case differs from Friday’s incident because it occurred near the Pacific Coast, rather than over the smuggling zones of the Amazon. Moreover, U.S.-Peruvian relations were tense at the time because Fujimori had recently shuttered his nation’s Congress in a “self-coup.”

Ground-level interdiction had faltered: DEA agents showed Fujimori well-documented evidence that Peruvian generals were protecting thriving jungle airstrips used to ferry cash and drugs to and from Peru and Colombia.

The new proposal--similar to a program adopted in Colombia--called for the U.S. to use its intelligence-gathering might to help the Peruvian air force shoot down airborne smugglers.

The idea provoked internal debate in the U.S. government, however. Lawyers for the State and Justice departments warned that “mistakes are likely to occur under any policy that contemplates the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight,” and “a shoot-down leading to the death of innocent persons would likely be a serious diplomatic embarrassment,” according to declassified U.S. documents obtained by the National Security Archive, a private group in Washington.

The bulk of the shoot-downs took place in the mid-1990s. Although U.S. officials did not provide a tally of casualties, most of the suspected smugglers died in the attacks, according to former U.S. Embassy officials.

In total, the Peruvian air force has shot down, forced down or strafed more than 30 suspected smuggling planes and seized more than a dozen aircraft on the ground, according to U.S. Embassy officials.

It is hard to verify the assertion that all of those who died were involved in smuggling. Former U.S. Ambassador Dennis Jett and two other former U.S. Embassy officials said they did not know of any mistaken shoot-downs. In all the incidents one former embassy official was aware of, authorities reported that they found evidence of drug trafficking in the planes’ wreckage.

Moreover, the Peruvian air force and CIA-employed air crews have a reputation for professionalism, according to the former officials.

But another embassy official said one weakness of the CIA crews was that only a few spoke Spanish well, causing potential communication difficulties with Peruvian air force officers.

The downings of planes have tapered off markedly as smugglers have shifted to rivers and short-hop flights. That relative inactivity bolsters the theory that the Peruvian officers involved in the Friday incident might have been inexperienced and overeager.

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Drug Crop Drop

A U.S.-Peruvian air interdiction program has helped slash net acres of coca cultivated in Peru by 70% since 1995, officials say. Coca crop acreage for three nations:

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Note: All Colombia figures are estimates. 1998 and ’99 not available.

Source: U.S. State Dept.