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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."