The United States remained dedicated to helping keep communism in check, and in 1962, the government developed a counterinsurgency program called Plan Lazo. The policy included a dramatic increase in aid and the training of Colombian soldiers and citizens “to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions, and as necessary, execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” The relationship between the two countries morphed in the late 1970s when the sale and use of illicit marijuana and cocaine trafficked through Colombia became a social crisis and a fiscal drain in the United States.
In the early 1980s, the white powder that had once been a white-collar drug exploded into American inner cities in the form of crack cocaine. By 1985, use of cocaine among young adults reached an all-time high with over 8 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and 6 percent of those between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four admitting to using the drug. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan called drug abuse “a repudiation of everything America is” and implored Americans to join a “national crusade against drugs.” With the increasing fervor over this issue, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (378–16) in favor of a $1.7 billion Omnibus Drug Bill. While the money and military aid allocated in the bill seemed extreme to some, the political climate in the United States gave lawmakers little option. “This is such an emotional issue—I mean, we’re at war here—that voting no would be too difficult to explain,” said Arizona senator John McCain. “By voting against it, you’d be voting against the war on drugs. Nobody wants to do that.” Ninety-seven million dollars was allocated to build prisons, $200 million for drug education, and $241 million for treatment. The bill was accompanied by an aggressive campaign to attack the drug business at its source.
Peru and Bolivia were the initial targets of the $200 million U.S. effort to find a supply-side fix to the problem. At the time, both Andean countries were the main growers of coca and producers of cocaine. The drug trade then traveled to Colombia, where smugglers took advantage of the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the narrow land bridge through Panama to ship the illegal export through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, or El Salvador, then from Guatemala to Mexico. A second passage ran northeast to Florida, directly or via Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or the Lesser Antilles. Planes, boats, and trucks carried the powder north, with transport accomplished easily and mostly with impunity. Eradication efforts began at the ground level, with local contract workers or government troops spraying herbicides or cutting down the coca plants. To help the thousands of coca farmers who were put out of work by the eradication programs, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) earmarked $131 million between 1987 and 1998 for crop substitution and alternative development for Bolivia and Peru. In both countries, the programs failed miserably, with the total area of coca cultivation decreasing by less than 5 percent. In another ill-fated attempt to stop cultivation, Bolivian growers were paid two thousand dollars per year by the U.S. Embassy’s Narcotics Affairs Section not to grow coca. According to a 2002 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the $100 million program to pay farmers was rife with corruption, as many ineligible beneficiaries collected payoffs, and farmers who collected funds just moved to other areas and continued to grow coca. Even in those early years, the idea of trying to wipe out cocaine by eradicating coca plants seemed pointless to many critics. Paul Boeker, president of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times in 1991 that the land in the Andes suitable to growing coca was virtually unlimited. “Nibbling around the edges of the leaf market,” he said, “is terribly inefficient.” Traffickers in Colombia soon realized the same thing: coca could just as easily be grown and processed in Colombia as in Peru and Bolivia. And toward the late 1980s, the bulk of the cultivation business was firmly planted in Colombian soil.
In a secondary method designed to dampen the flow of illegal imports, the United States put pressure on the Colombian government to extradite captured drug dealers. A bilateral extradition treaty between Colombia and the United States had come into effect in 1979 under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Julio César Turbay. The treaty—along with $26 million in U.S. aid—launched what Washington thought would be a model antinarcotics program. A snag was hit when President Belisario Betancur, elected in 1982, refused to extradite Colombian nationals as a matter of principle. But two years later, following the murder of the Colombian minister of justice by Pablo Escobar’s men, Betancur relented and began approving the extradition requests. From November 1984 to June 1987, Colombia extradited thirteen accused narco-traffickers, including Carlos Lehder, who was believed to have amassed a net worth of $2.5 billion. The thirty-eight-year-old Lehder was sentenced in the United States to life without parole, plus an additional 135 years. But in a major setback for Washington’s antidrug effort, in June 1987, the Colombian Supreme Court declared the extradition treaty unconstitutional. More than seventy extradition requests were shelved, including one for Medellín cartel CEO Pablo Escobar—arguably one of the most successful drug bosses who ever lived.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the reign of the big cartel bosses continued to fuel ever-increasing violence. Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín were repeatedly racked by bomb attacks, kidnappings, and shootings intended to intimidate government officials into changing laws to favor the drug traffickers. Brutal conflicts also erupted among the big cartels and reached a pinnacle in 1993, when a war broke out between Pablo Escobar and a rival vigilante group, Los Pepes. Although the cartels were a scourge for the Colombian government, some in the general population, reaping the benefits of a drug economy and of generous cartel bosses who sought to improve their communities, had a more favorable feeling toward the cartels. Soccer stadiums, churches, schools, and low-income housing were built compliments of drug money. All the while, the Colombian government and justice system became increasingly impotent and permeated with rampant corruption.
The FARC and other armed groups were also capitalizing on the new profits. At the time, guerrillas controlled many of the coca-growing regions in central and southern Colombia, while the cartels managed much of the cocaine production and trafficking. The guerrillas operated by taxing the cartels and drug producers for protection and services. According to a Rand Corporation report, fees (which fluctuated depending on market value) were approximately $15 per kilogram for production of coca paste and $10.50 per kilogram for cocaine shipments. The FARC demanded $5,200 for international drug flights and $2,600 for domestic drug flights. They also charged “protection” fees for each laboratory, landing strip, and acre of coca and poppy fields. This economic alliance began to collapse when the leaders of the cartels in Medellín and Cali began investing their newfound wealth in property, primarily large cattle ranches, which placed them firmly in the ranks of the guerrillas’ traditional enemy—the landowning elite. Beginning in the early 1980s, family-based drug empires invested millions of dollars to buy more than 2.5 million acres—more than one-twelfth of Colombia’s productive farmland. In turn, the guerrillas began a policy of kidnapping and extortion of the cartel members. For protection and retaliation, the drug lords organized and financed their own paramilitary armies. Politicians, ranchers, and peasants tired of guerrilla attacks helped form the “self-defense” groups. Most notorious were two organizations using the same name: Muerte a Secuestradores, or MAS (Death to Kidnappers). One group was formed as a death squad for the Medellín cartel; the other was formed by army officers and ranchers.
At the time, the units were actually sanctioned by the government and military leaders, who had called for peasant self-defense groups to rise up against the guerrillas. The policy initiated Colombia’s “Dirty War” as paramilitary groups linked to drug cartels worked closely with the Colombian military to brutally torture and murder suspected guerrillas, guerrilla sympathizers, and peasant union leaders. At the same time, the self-defense uni
ts attacked police and authorities investigating drug trafficking and paramilitary activity. Throughout the 1980s, paramilitary groups were implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of police officers, judges, and political leaders, including Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984.
By 1993, with strongly antidrug president César Gaviria in office, the cartel bosses began to fall. Escobar was murdered in December 1993 by Colombian Special Forces, with the help of U.S. intelligence agents, who firmly believed that they had put a nail in the coffin of not just a wanted drug boss but the war on drugs. There were fifteen more top cartel leaders left. “We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go,” John Carnevale, director of planning and budget at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), told Rolling Stone in 2007. “There was this feeling that if we got all 16, it’s not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs.” Shortly after Escobar was taken out of the business, the remaining fifteen cartel bosses were either killed or safely out of circulation in U.S. prisons. There were copious pats on the back and champagne toasts from Bogotá to Washington.
It soon became apparent that the celebration had been premature. By the mid-1990s, a multitude of factions—guerrillas, paramilitaries, local peasants, city drug dealers, and street gangs—entered the business to fill the power vacuum. The proliferation of new drug regimes made the trafficking business more robust than ever. Manuel Marulanda’s guerrilla army, with an estimated eighteen thousand soldiers controlling more than 50 percent of rural Colombia, was well positioned to take a large percentage of the new market strategy. Although the FARC was only one of several larger shareholders in a much bigger export operation, the regime change from cartels to insurgent armies was not lost on U.S. president Bill Clinton, who repeatedly linked the FARC to drug trafficking by referring to them as “narco-guerrillas.” Manuel Marulanda, who did not appreciate the “narco” label, would continually downplay his organization’s role in the drug trade and claim he could eradicate coca production in three to five years with crop-substitution programs if supplied with economic aid from the government and international organizations. All the while, his army was making a fortune and steadily increasing its military armament strength and troop levels, and launching successful offensives and attacks throughout the country.
When it was apparent both that the drug flow was actually increasing and that Colombia—the United States’ strongest ally in South America—was losing its fight against the guerrillas, the United States stepped up its funding to the tune of $309 million in 1999, followed by $765 million in 2000. The behemoth offshoot of the war on drugs was a six-year program dubbed “Plan Colombia” by the Clinton administration, which argued that wiping out the guerrillas was crucial to ending the flow of drug imports. To prop up the Colombian military, the State Department—which is responsible for antidrug operations abroad—turned to U.S. defense contractors to supply the Colombian military with weapons, military training, and equipment to fight the guerrillas. As Colombia continued to enjoy its status as the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid, the military components of Plan Colombia were substantially downplayed publicly, while the coca eradication and fumigation program became its touted centerpiece. (USAID began a $52.5 million alternative development program in 2000 to coincide with the military and eradication components of Plan Colombia. The funds were to be administered through the Colombian government. But because nearly all of the coca-growing regions were completely under the control of insurgents, the programs had little success.)
As with other military contracts, the outsourcing of the war on drugs in Colombia was designed to protect the U.S. government from liability should anything go awry. And to complicate an already-confusing picture, larger corporations would frequently subcontract to smaller companies in order to distance themselves from accountability. The military’s SOUTHCOM Reconnaissance System (SRS) program that employed Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell, and Marc Gonsalves in 2003 was no different. Lockheed Martin was selected by the DOD as the prime contractor, which then subcontracted to Northrop Grumman, which then subcontracted to California Microwave Systems. The practice created an absence of oversight or protocols for the CMS employees. A 2003 U.S. Navy investigation found that there had been no written set of standard operating procedures at CMS. Pilots and systems operators had to learn procedures largely by word of mouth. DynCorp (which ran the fumigation missions) was the biggest U.S. contractor in Colombia and had the largest budget, the most planes, and a fleet of SAR helicopters. However, the positions at CMS were coveted because they paid nearly 25 percent more than what the DynCorp pilots were making for similar work. (According to former CMS pilot Doug Cockes, pilots were paid $160,000 per year and systems analyst, slightly more.)
Although they considered the drug-interdiction work they were doing an important part of America’s war on drugs, most of the men took the job for one reason, according to Stansell. “If it weren’t for the money,” he wrote in Out of Captivity, “we wouldn’t have been in Colombia. We were making good coin, and that was important to us—what it brought to our egos, what it might mean down the line for our kids and our retirement. I wasn’t so much interested in being a hero with a capital H, as I was being a hero to my family and in my own mind by bringing down some big bucks. Call me shallow. Call me greedy. Call me what you want. I didn’t care. I still don’t really. All I was doing was living the American dream.” Stansell and his colleagues were hired to work four weeks in Colombia and then be home in the States for two weeks. In Colombia, the men lived in La Fontana, an upscale apartment complex in northern Bogotá. Although most of them weren’t single, four weeks away from home was a long time. Many found the local Colombian women—legendary for their beauty and sensuality—irresistible.
The men were tasked with finding drug labs and smuggling routes used by the FARC. They used photographic equipment during the day and infrared remote sensing gear at night. But from five thousand feet, differentiating coca labs from farmers’ huts in an endless sea of green wasn’t easy. Growers had become so accustomed to the planes that they’d found dozens of ways of disguising labs, including covering them with rain-forest vegetation or building them alongside working farmhouses. The contractors also looked for coca fields. The homogeneous swaths of bright green leaves were easily identifiable in aerial photographs from directly overhead. However, the acreage was so great throughout the region controlled by the FARC, and the crops were so widely distributed, that finding all of the coca planted in Colombia with the two CMS platform planes was an impossible task. Flying at lower altitudes would make their reconnoitering job easier, but it would also mean that the planes were more vulnerable to guerrilla fire. Because guerrillas had shot down half a dozen crop-dusting planes since the beginning of aerial fumigation in the 1990s, DynCorp made it a policy to have the spray planes followed by SAR forces in Black Hawk or Huey helicopters, ready to intervene in case of a crash or hostile fire. For the CMS missions, however, there were no SAR capabilities at all.
Several of the pilots had complained that the planes they flew on the reconnaissance missions, loaded with heavy equipment, far exceeded the weight limit for the Cessna. In fact, two CMS pilots, Douglas Cockes and Paul Hooper, who had worked for the company for more than two years, had written lengthy letters in November and December 2002 to Northrop Grumman, detailing the problems with the planes and the missions: “The mission aircraft could not reach any suitable landing area if the engine failed over most of the terrain over which the SRS mission is flown. The continued use of this platform invites a catastrophic impact in mountainous terrain if there is an engine failure.…” Cockes and Hooper asked that Northrop Grumman immediately replace the single-engine Caravan with a more powerful dual-engine Beechcraft King Air 300 series aircraft. “This is uniquely an issue of safety and a recommendation that will possibly save lives, limit the companies’ exposure and enhance the mission’s performance.”
The concerns of Hooper and Cockes were ignored. The two pilots had tried to rally support from Thomas Howes and Tommy Janis (the pilot who was killed by the guerrillas after his successful crash landing on February 13, 2003), but Howes and Janis, although agreeing with Hooper and Cockes to some extent, refused to add their names to the complaint and continued to fly missions. Their decision and the company’s refusal to upgrade the aircraft to a dual-engine plane made Hooper and Cockes furious. According to those working at the airport hangars where CMS had its Bogotá offices, the single-engine problem was already well known. In August 2001, the Cessna that Janis was flying lost power at thirteen thousand feet, twenty miles out over the Caribbean Sea. He was an excellent pilot and was able to glide the plane to a safe landing at the airport in Santa Marta, in northern Colombia. Because Janis had been on a flight to Miami for aircraft maintenance and not on an official reconnaissance mission at the time, there was no report filed or any investigation into the cause of the engine failure.
Although the pilots continued to fly missions, infighting between the pilots and CMS management about safety issues was rampant. Thomas Schmidt, who was a Vietnam veteran, had nearly come to blows with the CMS site manager, Steve McCune, who Schmidt believed had no idea about flying and therefore no business telling pilots what to do. The animosity between the two resulted in write-ups for Schmidt for flying too close to a mountain and endangering the crew. “They never asked for Tommy’s side of the story,” says Sharon Schmidt, Tommy Schmidt’s wife. “Tommy was pretty angry about that. He said, ‘Why not talk to the guys who were in the plane?’ But they reprimanded Tommy, which was really stupid. It was just another reason why there was so much animosity there.”
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