U.S. Pilot Dies in Colombia Crash

Becoming the fifth victim this year in the U.S. anti-drug war in Colombia, an American pilot was killed Monday when his plane crashed while on a drug-eradication mission in the southwestern department of Narino.

The civilian contractor was piloting a State Department T-65 air tractor when it went down near the city of Pasto, according to a U.S. Embassy official. The plane was spraying fields of opium poppies, the base of heroin, and there was no one else aboard, embassy officials said.

Aerial fumigation of both poppy and coca crops -- the latter the raw material of cocaine -- is a large portion of the $2-billion aid package known as Plan Colombia that the United States has provided to this country since 1998. The fumigation operations are largely carried out by the civilian contractor DynCorp, which has lost three other pilots since 1997 on such missions. DynCorp spokesman Mike Dickerson in Southern California would not say Monday whether the pilot was a company employee.

U.S. officials, for their part, declined to say whether the crash was an accident or the result of sabotage by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has hit spray planes an estimated 70 times during the last year. The officials said that the pilot died on impact.

Colombian Gen. Paolo Rodriguez -- the commander of the army’s 3rd Brigade, which has jurisdiction over Narino -- categorized the crash as an accident. The FARC was not involved, Rodriguez said.

Col. Guillermo Chavez Ocana, the police commander for Narino, said the plane crashed at 3:30 p.m. after taking off from the provincial capital of Popayan in the department of Cauca. It was escorted by four search-and-rescue helicopters and appeared to have crashed into a mountain about a two-hour drive from Pasto, he said.

“We are sure it was an accident,” Ocana said, adding that there was no evidence that the FARC, or any other militia, had been in the area or shot at the plane.

The body of the pilot, whose name was not immediately disclosed, did not have any bullet wounds, according to Ocana. He said that more details would be forthcoming after investigators arrived today from the capital, Bogota.

The spray aircraft was the third U.S. airplane to have crashed in Colombia in the last two months. The first two, both single-engine Cessna 208s, went down in the jungle state of Caqueta.

In the first crash, one American, Thomas John Janis, was executed by FARC rebels while three others were kidnapped by the FARC. Their names were revealed in the Colombian media over the weekend as Tom Howes, Keith Stansell and Mark Gonzalez.

Three other Americans were killed immediately on impact when their Cessna 208 crashed into a mountainside shortly after taking off from Larandia military base as part of the massive hunt for the three kidnapped Americans. All were civilian contractors.