Three US planes down in two months

by Maria Engqvist

11 April 2003

Earlier this week, a US mercenary pilot was killed when his State Department owned plane crashed in southern Colombia. It is suspected that rebel gunfire might have caused the crash. A total of three US planes have been lost in the last two weeks and 17 US soldiers have been killed in Colombia's civil war in the last few years.

It is assumed that the mercenary pilot is a former US Air Force pilot employed by the State Department contractor Dyncorp – a major provider of mercenary military personnel in Colombia's civil war. The US Embassy declined to comment further on the incident.

Colombian government-friendly TV channel Caracol reported that the US pilot was flying a T-65 spray plane in a mission where several US-donated Black Hawk attack helicopters also participated.

Officially, the US fumigation planes are spraying toxic chemicals to destroy illicit crops used as raw material for cocaine and heroine production. But according to the Colombian campesino federation COCCA, that represents around 1 mio. poor campesinos, the US spray planes also target legal crops such as beans and corn in order to depopulate rural areas, where there is strong support for leftist insurgencies.

Only two weeks before the crash, three US military intelligence personnel were killed when their spy plane apparently was shot down by rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, a leftist group fighting for land reforms and against neoliberal policies. The spy plane was participating in a massive search-and-rescue mission to find three other US intelligence experts working for the CIA whose plane – also a Cessna 208 – was downed in rebel territory near the US Larandia base on February 13th.

A fourth CIA agent and a Colombian soldier who had been aboard were killed in a fire fight with the rebels after that crash, after which the three remaining agents surrendered and were taken prisoners by the FARC. Thousands of Colombian troops, assisted by U.S. intelligence and operations planners, have since been searching the jungles and mountains of southern Colombia without success.

The FARC has offered to release the three captured US agents together with a number of captured Colombian military officers and high-profile politicians also held by the insurgents, in exchange for the release of captured guerrillas. The government of right-wing extremist Alvaro Uribe has so far rejected the proposal. Instead Uribe has called for increased US military intervention to assist the government's besieged forces.

This week's casualty takes the death toll of US citizens in Colombia's civil war – whether official US military personnel or mercenaries – to 17 in recent years. Last week, the US Congress approved an extra 105 million US dollars in military aid to the government of Alvaro Uribe.