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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.