America's Shadow Drug War

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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.

Ground Zero in the Drug War Farmers, narco traffickers and soldiers in the Amazon junglesthe grim faces of the drug war

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.