Colombia Plane Crash Appears to Be Accident

An anti-narcotics reconnaissance flight missing since Friday probably crashed into an unmapped mountain, killing the five U.S. servicemen and two Colombians on board, U.S. anti-drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey told foreign reporters here Monday.

“The aircraft . . . probably in bad weather in mountainous terrain ran into a mountain,” McCaffrey said. “We don’t have an answer.”

“The evidence so far would indicate that . . . [they] have probably lost their lives in [an] accident,” he said.

If so, the American victims would be the first U.S. military personnel killed while fighting the drug industry in Colombia, although several American civilian pilots have died when their crop dusters crashed while fumigating narcotics crops.

Aerial search teams had spotted plane wreckage near the Ecuadorean border over the weekend, but because of bad weather and the remoteness of the site in mountainous southern Colombia, they still had not confirmed that it was the four-engine De Havilland RC-7, McCaffrey said.

Operations have been further complicated because the wreckage is in rebel-held territory.

Officials had previously feared that the plane might have been shot down by insurgents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who control the cocaine-producing fields where the craft was flying and collect an estimated $600 million a year in “taxes” from traffickers to protect drug crops.

Guerrilla commander Raul Reyes, in an interview Sunday with Colombia’s Caracol television network, denied that the insurgents had shot down the plane.

Rebel involvement in Colombia’s drug trade has transformed U.S. military cooperation in anti-narcotics projects here, which began earlier this decade, into a thorny topic. U.S. officials have repeatedly insisted that they want no role in Colombia’s decades-old conflict with rebels but are committed to helping the country fight drugs. More than 100 U.S. military personnel are in the nation participating in the anti-drug effort.

“The U.S. has paid inadequate attention to a serious and growing emergency in the region, which flows from drug-criminal operations,” said McCaffrey, who was in Colombia on a previously scheduled three-day visit. Colombia supplies an estimated 75% to 80% of the cocaine consumed in the United States and most of East Coast heroin.

McCaffrey is scheduled to visit the training base for a new Colombian army anti-narcotics battalion that is expected to receive substantial U.S. aid. Until now, most of the nearly $300 million in U.S. anti-drug aid budgeted for Colombia this year has been channeled to the national police.