America's Shadow Drug War

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."