America's Shadow Drug War

By Joshua Cooper Ramo/Iquitos

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.

--With reporting by Jay Branegan, Massimo Calabresi, Elaine Shannon and Mark Thompson/Washington, Lucien O. Chauvin/Lima, Peter Katel/Mexico City and Ruth Morris/Bogota, with other bureaus

With reporting by Jay Branegan, Massimo Calabresi, Elaine Shannon and Mark Thompson/Washington, Lucien O. Chauvin/ Lima, Peter Katel/Mexico City and Ruth Morris/Bogota, with other bureaus