U.S. Searches Cautiously for Servicemen

An armada of U.S. and Colombian aircraft searched Saturday for five American servicemen and two Colombians missing on an anti-narcotics flight over guerrilla territory, giving immediacy to concerns about the growing U.S. military role in the world’s leading cocaine-producing nation.

Military planes and helicopters searched cautiously for the soldiers, whose four-engine De Havilland RC-7 plane did not return Friday morning from a routine mission over mountainous, tropical Putumayo province in southern Colombia, said Army Capt. Jack Miller, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in Latin America.

“In this area, we have to be sensitive to the FARC,” he said, using the initials in Spanish of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, this nation’s oldest and largest rebel force.

Leftist rebels protect cocaine crops in the area and are thought to operate laboratories there as well, said Juan Carlos Arteaga, an anti-narcotics officer of the Colombian national police. They often fire on planes fumigating to kill drug crops.

There was no indication that the insurgents had shot down the missing flight, but their presence makes rescue efforts more difficult, Arteaga said.

Occurring two days before a scheduled visit to Colombia by U.S. drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the incident highlighted concerns about the increasingly intertwined relations between guerrillas and drug traffickers, as well as how that complicates U.S. efforts to assist Colombia in stemming the flow of cocaine and heroin to the United States. Colombia supplies about three-fourths of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. and dominates the East Coast heroin market.

“Until the government of Colombia can gain control over territory where drug trafficking activities are occurring, counter-drug operations will be difficult and dangerous,” concludes a recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress.

Security concerns forced the U.S. Customs Service to withdraw two of its drug-tracking planes from Colombia last year.

The rebels receive an estimated $500 million to $600 million in “taxes” for guarding drug crops in their territory, which has expanded to include most of Colombia’s drug-producing region, according to the report. Rebel squads operating in coca- and poppy-growing areas are the strongest insurgent forces, Colombian military sources say.

To combat Colombia’s expanding drug trade, Congress has authorized $2.6 billion in anti-narcotics aid for Colombia over three years, starting this year. The U.S. provided a total of $625 million in aid in the first eight years of the decade.

The U.S. military also has begun sharing information and providing advice on reforming a Colombian army battered by the rebels.

“Lack of government control over nearly 40% of the countryside has allowed cocaine cultivation in Colombia to increase by 28% in the last year,” Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month.

Distinguishing between anti-narcotics support and fighting the guerrillas has become an increasingly tricky matter for the more than 100 U.S. military personnel stationed in Colombia.

For example, the base in Apiay, 45 miles southeast of Bogota, where the missing plane’s flight originated, was also the staging area for a military counterattack against a FARC offensive two weeks ago.

Nor do the rebels make fine distinctions between anti-narcotics and anti-subversive aid when they view the U.S. military role in Colombia. FARC has said it will consider U.S. servicemen it captures to be “military targets.”

U.S. civilians have frequently been kidnapped by rebels. Some have been released after paying ransom, but three U.S. environmentalists were slain by a FARC group in March.

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Times staff writer Darling reported from San Salvador. Special correspondent Morris reported from Bogota.