In a 1999 report, the U.S. State Department claims success for what it call the “airbridge denial” effort that targets the shipment of coca paste from Peru to drug laboratories in Colombia, where it is processed into cocaine hydrochloride. 

The collaboration between Peru and the U.S. that has made this effort possible has a long and turbulent history, which is currently under investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 

The CIA, meanwhile, is conducting an investigation of its own into the tragic shootdown, since the missionary flight was tracked and targeted by a contractor to the agency. 

When news of the tragedy reached President Bush at the Summit of the Americas, he called for a temporary moratorium on the “airbridge denial” effort, but on the very next day the White House submitted a proposal to rename and extend the U.S.’s as yet unproven “Plan Colombia.”  The name of this new proposal is the Andean Regional Initiative and its price tag is initially set at US$850 million.  The initiative, in fact, has already begun, in spite of the serious questions raised by this recent disaster and its dubious history. 

As William Arkins indicated on May 7th in The Washington Post:  “The military facility in Iquitos, Peru is not a U.S. air base, nor does it appear in any list of U.S. military facilities.  The Americans providing real-time tracking information to the Peruvian air force are not government or military personnel.”

They are, in fact, contractors from Aviation Development Corporation, a company which is allowed to operate out of a remote hanger at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL.  Likewise, DynaCorp of Reston, VA has been “privateering” for us on the Colombian side of the border. 

Arkins continued: “After the missionary plane shootdown in Peru, government spokesmen and CIA officials were quick to justify their counterdrug arrangements...  Their explanations revealed not only a labyrinth at Iquitos but at least a dozen additional officially non-existent air bases, radars and command centers extending from Honduras and El Salvador down to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia and back north to Curacao, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas.”

Unless some hard questions are asked about the use of “privateers” in our “Drug War,” this trend will continue, and what kind of results should we expect?

Searching Questions

Questions have already been publicly voiced by U.S. Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Illinois) during a recent hearing of the Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources:

“Why do we need to outsource and privatize our efforts?  Are we outsourcing to in order avoid public scrutiny, controversy or embarrassment?  Is it to hide body bags from the media...   Or is it to provide deniability because these private contractors are not covered by the same rules as active duty U.S. service persons?

“...The U.S. taxpayers are unwittingly funding a private war with private soldiers.  This is a “shoot first and ask question later” policy encouraged by the U.S. in its war on drugs.  Shooting down unarmed civilian aircraft, even those thought to be carrying drugs, is contrary to fundamental U.S. law enforcement policy.  I don’t think that any of my colleagues would support U.S. law enforcement officials in this country shooting down planes or blowing up vans based simply on the suspicion or even the conviction that drugs are present.  We believe in due process which should be no less respected in the other countries than it is in our own.  The kind of action we saw in Peru last week, amounts to an extra-judicial killing and we in this country now have innocent blood on our hands because of it.”

Nothing New

For over a decade, the U.S. military has provided support for similar missions in Peru and Colombia.  Radar tracking of suspected drug flights was provided by the Defense Department until 1994, when both countries announced a policy of shooting down drug traffickers.  U.S. support was discontinued due to the concerns that shooting at civilian aircraft was a violation of international law, and that the United States could be held liable for any assistance to such a program.  After a long and bitter debate in Congress, new legislation was passed that framed the drug war in a national security context, and support of interdiction missions was restored by the Clinton administration in 1995. 

As this article goes to press, over 75% of the materials and personnel for Plan Colombia have already been contracted, but less than half have been deployed.  As these forces, along with any sent in the name of an “Andean Regional Initiative” are mobilized, our involvement in intrigues such as those in Iquitos will be many times greater that it has ever been. 

Concerns about hiring private armies to fight the drug war have been directly addressed with the introduction of the Andean Region Contractor Accountability Act, HR 1591, by Rep. Schakowsky in the U.S. House on April 25.  It would: “prohibit the United States Government from providing financing for nongovernmental organizations or individuals to carry out military, law enforcement, armed rescue, or other related operations in the countries of the Andean region, including any operations relating to narcotics control efforts.”

If passed, HR 1591 would undercut the legal groundwork laid by the Clinton administration in 1994 that has allowed our dubious involvement in the shooting down of civilian planes for the past six years. As a consequence, it will help to restore government oversight of our taxpayer funded actions, and hopefully reign in an accelerated movement toward privateering in the name of the war on drugs. Otherwise, a remote and previously obscure outpost like Iquitos may very well become our next Gulf of Tonkin.

by David Roknich

Dynacorp Goes to Iraq