NYTimes | The Honduran Air Force pilot did not know what
to do. It was the dead of night, and he was chasing a small, suspected
drug plane at a dangerously low altitude, just a few hundred feet above
the Caribbean. He fired warning shots, but instead of landing, the plane
flew lower and closer to the sea.
“So the pilot made a decision, thinking it was the best thing to do,”
said Arturo Corrales, Honduras’s foreign minister, one of several
officials to give the first detailed account of the episode. “He shot
down the plane.”
Four days later, on July 31, it happened again. Another flight departed
from a small town on the Venezuelan coast, and using American radar
intelligence, a Honduran fighter pilot shot it down over the water.
How many people were killed? Were drugs aboard, or innocent civilians?
Officials here and in Washington say they do not know. The planes were
never found. But the two episodes — clear violations of international
law and established protocols — have ignited outrage in the United
States, bringing one of its most ambitious international offensives
against drug traffickers to a sudden halt just months after it started.
All joint operations in Honduras are now suspended. Senator Patrick J.
Leahy of Vermont, expressing the concerns of several Democrats in
Congress, is holding up tens of millions of dollars in security
assistance, not just because of the planes, but also over suspected
human rights abuses by the Honduran police and three shootings in which
commandos with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration effectively led raids when they were only supposed to act as advisers.
The downed aircraft, in particular, reminded veteran officials of an American missionary plane that was shot down in 2001 by Peruvian authorities
using American intelligence. It was only a matter of time, they said,
before another plane with the supposedly guilty turned out to be filled
with the innocent.
But the clash between the Obama administration and lawmakers had been
building for months. Fearful that Central America was becoming overrun
by organized crime, perhaps worse than in the worst parts of Mexico, the
State Department, the D.E.A. and the Pentagon rushed ahead this year
with a muscular antidrug program
with several Latin American nations, hoping to protect Honduras and use
it as a chokepoint to cut off the flow of drugs heading north.
Then the series of fatal enforcement actions — some by the Honduran
military, others involving shootings by American agents — quickly turned
the antidrug cooperation, often promoted as a model of international
teamwork, into a case study of what can go wrong when the tactics of war
are used to fight a crime problem that goes well beyond drugs.
