Many questions still linger about what exactly led to the fatal events. But onlookers say that they saw the jet fire machine-gun rounds into the Cessna, and watched the tiny plane crash into the river. Though Peruvian onlookers were able to rescue the Cessna’s pilot from the water, Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, had already been killed — according to reports, a single bullet passed through the child’s skull as she sat in her mother’s lap, then entered the mother’s body.

Why did they die, and what could have prevented this terrible event? Very few questions have been answered at this point, and it will likely be weeks before an investigation can offer the public more information.

Contributing to the confusion is the fact that drug interdiction flights, like all of our military anti-narcotics operations in Latin America, are secretive and complex. They involve not only the military operations of the home governments, which themselves lack transparency, but an elaborate system of U.S. foreign aid from a variety of agencies, including the departments of Defense and State, the U.S. Customs Service, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency, which provide host nations with military training, equipment and intelligence. Making matters even murkier is the presence of numerous American mercenaries, hired as freelance pilots, ground crews and intelligence personnel by both the host nations and the United States.

In the past five years, Peru has reportedly shot down roughly 30 planes it suspected of drug running, and grounded many more. Coca cultivation in the Andean nation has fallen by as much as 60 percent as a result of joint U.S.-Peru anti-drug efforts, whose main focus is air interception, the U.S. administration said.

On Monday, the Bush administration ordered U.S. surveillance flights suspended pending an official investigation. But, anxious to avoid jeopardizing an interdiction program that has been, at least in its immediate region, a rare success, the administration downplayed the event, acknowledging that it was a “tragic error” but calling it an “isolated incident.” The administration stopped short of blaming the Peruvian government, but said its military failed to follow proper rules of engagement, and that it acted too hastily by firing against the plane.

The Peruvian military denied any wrongdoing, saying it followed proper procedure — leaving unanswered the question of how a procedure could be “proper” that resulted in the death of innocent civilians.

The Bowers tragedy throws a spotlight on the $48 million in narcotics control aid that the U.S. government gave to Peru last year, as well as the $32 million that came as part of Plan Colombia, the military anti-narcotics campaign implemented last year in Andean drug-producing nations. It is certain to lead to hard questions about the viability of American participation in the interdiction program — questions concerning not just the competence of America’s military partners in the region but the sprawling, internecine war on coca production itself, a war critics charge is unwinnable. Despite the fact that coca production in Peru has dropped, coca production in the region as a whole has increased, as growers pressured out of Peru have moved into Colombia.

Salon asked Adam Isacson, a senior associate at Washington’s Center for International Policy, what this tragedy can tell us about our involvement in the drug war.

Is Peru the only government that has a policy to shoot down planes involved in drug trafficking? And what is the role of the U.S. in that policy?

What we do is hand off the intelligence to that country’s military, and it’s really up to them what they do with it. Peru has chosen to shoot down. It’s often called jokingly the “You fly, you die” policy. Colombia says they shoot down, but they don’t do it very often. What they do more often is just sort of force down planes and then strafe them on the ground. Venezuela hasn’t done much of anything lately. But the real air transit point is between Peru and Colombia, from the growing areas to the processing areas.

Why does Peru have that policy?

I imagine they adopted that policy with a lot of encouragement from the United States back in the mid-’90s. Certainly we were pleased when [disgraced former President Alberto] Fujimori and [fugitive former spy chief Vladimiro] Montesinos adopted that policy.

What do you make of all the confusion between the Cessna, the CIA plane and the Peruvian jet?

We’re not going to know that for a while; that’s going to be for the investigation. When we hand over this sort of intelligence to the Peruvians, though, there’s either an implied or a specific agreement that they are going to follow procedures — trying to communicate with the plane, dipping your wings, shooting a warning shot. It doesn’t look like they did any of that.

It looks like they just fired?

That’s what we’re hearing from the first eyewitness accounts. If that’s true, than it’s more than just a few miscommunications. It’s a complete neglect of what they’ve been told to do. We’re just not going to know until they do a real investigation.

If this mission was part of our anti-narcotics aid to Peru, why was the CIA involved?

It’s inter-agency, they like to say. The defense department is supposed to be in the lead on this, but of course the CIA are one of the many agencies involved. And since they have access to a lot of the good equipment, it makes sense that that was a CIA plane. I’m not sure, but I think there was a private contractor involved too, whether they own the plane or whether they were pilots — pilots are always in short supply — I’m not sure yet what their role was. But there were CIA and contractors and a Peruvian air force official on board the plane that was watching that gave the information to the jet.

What does this tragedy draw our attention to?

More than anything, I think it just draws attention to the militaries we’re working with in that region. The fact that this was done with U.S. intelligence, with a plane given by the U.S., by pilots and airmen trained and equipped by the U.S. — everything there was paid for, bought and sold by us. The A-37 was given to Peru for counternarcotics purposes.

It’s time that we started looking a little more closely at who we’re giving this stuff to. These are institutions with long histories of corruption and human rights abuses. So that obviously calls into question their professionalism and what they can be relied on to do. We may be lucky that this hasn’t happened before.

Are these interdiction missions part of Plan Colombia?

This predates Plan Colombia, it’s something they’ve been doing since at least the mid-’90s, but it is being beefed up somewhat by the money that was in last year’s Plan Colombia aid package. Again, I’m not sure where the intelligence plane took off from, but it probably took off from this site in Manta, Ecuador, which is getting a lot of money for refurbishment and construction from the Plan Colombia aid package.

What other countries do these flight missions?

Looking for suspicious aircraft is something we do really everywhere from Bolivia all the way up to the border of Mexico. It’s most intense, though, in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, where obviously the cocaine comes out of first and also where a lot of the coca paste gets taken to be processed into crystal cocaine — that’s what a lot of the flights going out of Peru do.

Does this relate at all to the flight that killed U.S. Army pilot Jennifer Odom in Colombia last year?

That plane was doing signals intelligence — they were actually listening in to stuff going on on the ground. Whereas this one was doing visual, looking up signals that had already been found by radar sites within the region, trying to ID the plane, I think. So it’s a little different, but it’s part of the same effort. It’s all counterdrug and all gathering intelligence by air. The Jennifer Odom plane was certainly a lot more sophisticated than what the CIA was using.

Peru has certainly gone through a lot of big changes in the past year, including the corruption scandal that brought down President Alberto Fujimori and his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos. How is that affecting the counternarcotics efforts in Peru?

To the best I can tell, it’s not having much effect on what’s going on. All the political turmoil is in Lima, on the coast, and most of the counternarcotics stuff is happening well over the Andes. For most Peruvians, it might as well be on a different planet. So the work with those particular units of the police, the air force, the navy, has probably remained about the same.

Actually, now that Fujimori is gone, it’s probably a little more politically palatable to start jacking up military aid, which is something that’s going to happen in 2002 if you look at George Bush’s request. The only thing that might have been disrupted over the past few months is the fact that many of the officers loyal to Montesinos were forced out. So there may be some intelligence gathering and command and control [may] have been disrupted a little bit. But that’s probably the only way it’s been weakened.

How has the implementation of Plan Colombia affected Peru?

Last year, the only money in Plan Colombia for Peru was about $32 million for helicopters. Since Peru had just stolen an election, it wasn’t really politically palatable or possible to give it to them. But they’re going to get more next year.

A lot of people are speculating that most of the aid for Colombia’s military is being concentrated in an area right along Colombia’s border with Ecuador and Peru, that we’re going to be pushing not just drug trafficking but also violence and refugees into Ecuador and Peru. So we may see an increase in coca and violence on the other side of the border.

That spillover is a big worry about Plan Colombia — that’s probably one reason why they’re proposing $90 million in military aid for Peru now. You push the coca growers out of one place, coca’s still profitable, so they might just cross the river and start cutting down jungle on the Peruvian side.

Does that military response have anything to do with their “shoot ‘em out of the sky” approach?

I think that attitude has been around for a while now. They’ve shot down about 30 planes in the past five years or so.

Why don’t we hear more about them? Have there been any more Americans killed, or any conflicts in the air between drug trafficking planes and intelligence or military planes?

If there have been dogfights in the air, I don’t know about them. I think usually they’re shooting down these little Cessna planes. According to official U.S. reports, they’ve always been narcos, and we’ve had no basis to challenge that and we’ve been assured that when they do shoot them down, it’s after trying to contact them several times, trying to signal to them in the air, firing warning shots, and only if they keep going do they shoot them down or force them down. But this mistake last week makes you wonder how often they are asking questions first before they shoot.

In general, this whole operation happens with almost no transparency. You’re asking me some very basic questions here and I’m still only able to give you very basic answers. Why is the CIA involved? What are these contractors? How do they chose their targets? We don’t know and nobody’s really asking.

Who is in charge of the oversight of these missions?

The oversight eventually falls on Congress — the international relations and armed services committees that are paying for this stuff. When staffers go down there they get flown to these bases and shown some select professional troops and a PowerPoint presentation telling them how effective they’ve been. But nobody asks questions about how we can avoid situations like this one.

Rather than have congressional staff, who are really overworked and underpaid, do all of this, [the agencies] should be forced to make information about this more and more accessible, so that there could be more of an evaluation of where we’re headed with this.

Sensationalist San Francisco stunt? Yeah, well, maybe so. But Sumell says her purpose is to draw attention to the erosion of pro-choice laws — and how else to combat a lack of attention than with a shocking public display?

“As a conceptual artist, I’m sometimes criticized for being too literal with my work,” she says. But she thinks being literal is sometimes the most appropriate way to convey a point. “It’s simple, it’s catchy and it’s not esoteric,” she asserts. “It’s straight to the point. And I really want people to think.”

Her art activism has gotten attention before. On the eve of President Bush’s Inauguration, a collective of artists Sumell belongs to covered the signs for Bush Street in San Francisco with signs that read “Puppet.” That project caught the eye of CNN and other media outlets. (Sumell’s hairy protest is not the first of its kind; Salon reported on a similar, pre-Inaugural protest back in December.)

A philanthropist friend is sponsoring Sumell’s planned trip to the nation’s capital for the event. “She said, ‘I can’t shave my bush; I’m too old,’” Sumell relays. So she decided to help in another way, on the condition that she remain anonymous. The philanthropist’s husband, according to Sumell, is a wealthy Republican contributor.

Have other women been more forthcoming with the raw materials? Some have expressed support for the project, she says, “but they don’t want to shave because they’re afraid of the itch. My response is, ‘Come on! Here, I’ll give you some Gold Bond powder. After three days, I swear, it goes away.’”

Summel says she’s a bit disappointed at the lack of concern that groups such as NOW and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League have been able to draw to the issue of women’s reproductive rights. “NOW has gotten too big,” she says. “It can’t have an intimate dialogue with American women,” so it feels to most women like some distant political organization. “I think it’s really ridiculous that I was the first person to tell my friends about the international gag order.”

What initially spurred Sumell to pursue the project was Bush’s ban on federal funding of family planning groups overseas that offer abortion counseling — an action he took on the 28th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and only 48 hours after being sworn into office.

She says the recent gag order is reminiscent of former President Bush’s ban on abortion counseling at federally funded family planning clinics in the U.S., which was eventually struck down in federal court. Even though Sumell, 27, is part of a generation of women who were born after the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision (the same year, in fact), a group that some feminist activists fear takes abortion rights for granted, she does remember living in South Carolina in the 1980s and seeing the way the earlier Bush gag order affected her neighbors there.

Sumell also repeats the concern that groups like NOW and NARAL have about the new administration: that reproductive rights will be eroded by incremental changes such as parental notification laws, added restrictions on abortion providers, a ban on “partial-birth” abortion and restrictions on the use of RU-486, all stated objectives of different Republicans in Congress.

So NOW’s march holds particular relevance to her. And while she hasn’t gotten much response from the event’s organizers, Sumell hopes her project will play an engaging role. She’ll set up a booth where women can do their part to add to the project. And she says she’ll keep plenty of Gold Bond available.

Berenson was found guilty in a secret military court five years ago, at age 26, and was sentenced to life in prison by hooded military judges for allegedly helping the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, plot a takeover of the Peruvian Congress.

Largely as the result of a vigilant campaign by her parents and friends back home, Berenson’s conviction was overturned last summer, but she has remained in prison. Peru hopes the new civil trial will help to clean up its tarnished international reputation after corruption scandals that led its former president, Alberto Fujimori, and his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, to resign last year.

“Lori is an accused terrorist, but she is not a terrorist,” her father, Mark Berenson, said through a translator Wednesday on Panamericana’s morning news program. “I know she is innocent. God knows she is innocent,” he said.

As he pleaded her case to the nation, he also pleaded with the Peruvian government, stating that “a person must be presumed innocent. It is up to the government of Peru to prove her guilty.”

Human rights groups are already criticizing the legal proceedings in Peru, whose judicial system is based on the 19th century Napoleonic Code, in which an accused is presumed guilty. Berenson has to sit in a built-in cell in the courtroom, and to consult with her lawyer during the proceedings, she has to ask for special permission from the presiding magistrate. Her family attorney from New York calls the setup “Kafka-esque.” But Berenson’s Peruvian attorneys say they are optimistic about the outcome.

Berenson enraged Peruvians — and alienated some would-be supporters — back in 1996 when she publicly defended the MRTA’s activities on Peruvian TV, saying, “There are no criminal terrorists in the MRTA. It is a revolutionary movement.” Her rancorous words prompted then President Fujimori’s initial hard-line defense of her original sentence.

When Fujimori ultimately decided to overturn her conviction, it marked a capitulation to larger pressure from the Peruvian people — pressure that finally drove him from office. Peru wants to put decades of car bombs, assassinations and corrupt politicians behind; Peruvians no longer want their country to be viewed as a black spot among the democratic reforms currently sweeping through Latin American countries like Chile and Guatemala.

In a story published in September, Salon national correspondent Bruce Shapiro wrote that despite the fact that Peruvian “courts do not meet internationally accepted standards of openness, fairness and due process,” the retrial is still “good news” for Berenson, since it will focus so much international attention on the country’s judicial system and the conflicting evidence against Berenson.

“It is Peru’s legal system as much as Lori Berenson which is on trial,” Shapiro wrote. “Through the unlikely combination of an American radical sympathizer, Washington’s drug war and Peru’s own factional politics, a country which just two months ago was an international laughingstock has an opportunity to redeem its justice system, and show itself capable of stepping past the overwrought emotions and laws which continue to afflict hundreds of similarly convicted but internationally anonymous ‘suspects.’”

Some of Williams’ classmates insisted that he was no more tortured than any other student at the school was. The disagreement about Williams illustrates one of the chief problems with efforts to crack down on bullying: It’s sometimes hard to agree on what constitutes bullying and who’s behind it.

In spite of that confusion, school reformers have floated a roster of anti-bullying measures in the wake of Columbine and, now, Santana. State legislatures in Colorado, Washington and California are taking action with school safety bills that would mandate programs in local school districts to target the bullying problem. Some schools, including Santana, have also turned to a Justice Department program called Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, which provides grants to help schools study campus violence.

Santana High School faced a widespread problem with student harassment years before Williams arrived at the school. A 1997 survey taken by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department found that half of Santana’s students didn’t feel safe on campus, 35 percent said they had been the victims of verbal abuse or insults and 12 percent said they had been physically threatened or intimidated. More than a third said they had experienced problems directly related to race or ethnicity.

Sadly, this sounds a lot like what’s going on at high schools all over the country. Despite the remarkable decrease in juvenile crime over the past decade — culminating in the lowest juvenile homicide rate since 1983 — students and their parents feel a great deal of fear. According to a Gallup poll taken in October, the number of teenagers involved in fights is declining, but more and more of those fights are happening at school. Two-thirds of students said fights at school were a “very big” or “fairly big” problem; 89 percent of those who had been involved in fights said they felt they had to stand up for themselves.

Increasingly, schools, states and the federal government are taking action to curb the disturbing trend.

Back at Santana High, the problem seemed to be growing. According to Gilbert Moore, spokesman for the Justice Department’s COPS program, which administers the grant, problems with bullying had been escalating at the school. From January 1997 to May 1998, “the local sheriff’s department noticed that there had been a noted increase in the victimization of juveniles both on the campus and in the surrounding neighborhood,” he says.

So the county sheriff’s office and the city of Santee applied for a school-based partnership program grant that would help them assess the source of the problem. In cooperation with the sheriff’s department, Santana High has used the grant to pay a small stipend for a student coordinator, who interviewed students about their experiences being bullied; a crime analyst; a crime prevention specialist; overtime for at least one police officer who worked with school officials and community groups; and equipment such as a computer, scanner and projector.

Moore emphasizes that the program is not geared toward dictating solutions — such as ramping up police patrols — but toward finding out what the root of the problem is. The “multifaceted approach” of the grant program is designed to get community groups, schools and police in contact with the students. “This whole concept of the discipline of school violence and school safety is evolving,” Moore says, “and it’s evolving because it’s been thrust in the lap of the country. We like to think that we’re in a leadership role in terms of getting law enforcement to focus on it and helping them get started addressing the problem.”

Santee was one of 322 applicants in 1998, only half of whom received a grant. Five percent of the grant money will pay for a formal evaluation to be sent to the Justice Department. But once that analysis is in, it will be up to the community to decide what to do about it. With two teenagers now dead and the eyes of the nation watching Williams’ impending trial, the conclusions they come to are likely to be influential.

Meanwhile, school safety bills under consideration in Colorado, Washington and California would mandate programs in local school districts to target the bullying problem. The California bill adds a policy for preventing bullying and a conflict-resolution program to the state’s existing school safety code. Colorado’s bill, which has passed the state Senate and awaits a vote in the house, would require each school district to draw up a specific policy to address bullying prevention and education. Washington’s legislation goes a step further, saying that each district’s policy must explicitly prohibit harassment, intimidation and bullying, and set out a procedure for reporting and responding to it.

Jaana Juvonen, a social scientist at the RAND institute, has studied school bullying for several years. She says she’s not surprised by tales of school shooters who are bullied to the point of violence. “Most of the victims suffer in silence. The minority of them do retaliate,” she says. In those extreme cases, Juvonen believes, kids essentially don’t know of another option to deal with the situation — they don’t know how to resolve the conflict in which they find themselves, and they act based on the models they have around them, whether that be violent video games or violence at home.

Juvonen is supportive but skeptical of violence prevention programs in general, arguing that their success depends greatly on their approach. “All kids can benefit from conflict resolution education and learning about strategies to deal with peer ridicule,” she says. But if the programs attempt to single out the bullies, they can do far more harm than good by making schools an even harsher place for kids. Targeting the problem kids is “very problematic” because it involves two assumptions. “One is that we can reliably and validly identify youngsters who are at risk — I’m afraid that’s not possible. If we use those kinds of identification procedures, we will overidentify kids and mislabel them,” Juvonen says.

The other problem with that approach is what happens next. If schools weed out those students and put them all together, “we may actually increase their risk of antisocial and delinquent behavior,” Juvonen says.

Her research shows that most kids in school are victims, and a minority are bullies. But an even smaller number are both. “It’s the last group who are really at risk for a multitude of problems.” After the Santana shooting, Education Secretary Rod Paige told reporters that he believes students’ “alienation and rage” is the biggest factor in school shootings. But in trying to stem that rage with mandated school programs, the government could be entering into rough territory.

Some argue that bullying has always existed, that it’s just part of growing up, and that trying to legislate human behavior is a no-win endeavor. What’s more, kids are often reluctant to come forward and tell teachers about what they’re going through (Williams, for instance, never reported that he was being bullied). The complex power struggle among kids tends to be invisible to the adults around them.

Researchers on youth violence caution the government against generic solutions to the problem of bullying. Among the most contentious are approaches that focus on punishing or excluding problem kids, whose troubles usually source back to violence or abuse at home or in their neighborhoods. Even taking into consideration the argument that bullies should be held accountable, sending them back into an environment of street violence, abuse, drug use and other delinquent kids tends to increase the harm they will visit on their peers.

No matter what solutions local districts come up with, it seems clear that schools will continue to bear much of the burden for some very big societal ills.

But Prop. 21 may not be the last tough-on-crime approach to juvenile violence. Already the Santee, Calif., shootings have led to now-familiar calls for action to reduce the problem: tougher gun control, stricter security on high school campuses, as well as, in the words of President Bush, teaching children “the difference between right and wrong.” But before the latest school shooting leads to more Draconian anti-juvenile crime measures, it’s worth noting that violence by youths has sharply declined in the last few years, even as killings at Columbine and Santana grabbed headlines. And some experts now think our hysteria about school violence may actually be limiting our attempts to curb it.

“You’re five times as likely to get killed on your way to school or from it than in school,” says Frank Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied crime statistics for 30 years. “So if you want to create a metal-detector society, you better put the metal detectors on the other side of the schoolyard.” The juvenile murder rate, Zimring notes, is at its lowest level in nearly 20 years. According to the Justice Department, juvenile murder arrests dropped 68 percent between their peak year of 1993 and 1999. And schools are still the safest place that kids can be.

But the public doesn’t seem to think so. A Gallup poll taken last April asked whether people felt a random school shooting like the one at Columbine was likely to happen in their area; 30 percent said they felt it was “very likely,” 36 percent said “somewhat likely” and only 13 percent said it would be “very unlikely.

The circumstances of the Santana shootings raise the possibility, however, that our paranoia about school shootings — and the “zero tolerance” policies schools adopt to crack down on potentially violent kids — may even be counterproductive. Williams’ friends told reporters that the boy had been boasting about shooting up the school for several days before claiming he was kidding, but they didn’t tell anyone, because they didn’t want to get him in trouble.

“By creating zero tolerance,” Zimring says, “you raise the price of telling an adult about what a kid you like told you. Under those circumstances, you get exactly what you had here: a reluctance to tell on your friends.”

Jaana Juvonen, a behavioral scientist at the Rand Institute, says the typical solutions that have arisen to combat juvenile violence “may not only be ineffective but may actually backfire.” Zero-tolerance policies, she says, are the worst example.

“We think of zero tolerance as the school’s way of showing kids how they will not tolerate that kind of behavior,” Juvonen says. “But this is a mere tactic to punish; it’s retribution. We focus on the act and we forget the motives, and by doing that we may actually increase a kid’s risk for future behavior problems, and at least the kid’s alienation from school.”

Another popular approach is to put police officers on campus — last month, the Department of Justice announced $70 million in new grants for COPS [Community Oriented Policing Services] in Schools programs in 47 states. But there was a cop on duty at Santana High, and he wasn’t able to stop the freshman from sneaking a pistol into school and opening fire in the boys’ bathroom.

Juvonen says she has never seen a study indicating that cops-in-schools programs have any benefit. She says such programs please school officials because they send a visible message “that our community is doing everything we can, that parents have peace of mind when they drop off their kids at the middle school because there’s police standing at the front door.”

But students might feel differently. “There is some preliminary evidence to show that in these schools where they have metal detectors and use security checks — where the physical safety issues are very salient — that that’s where kids’ anxieties are heightened. It’s a constant reminder of how unsafe the school is.”

The most important aspect of preventing school violence, Juvonen says, is in fact psychological safety. A report from the surgeon general in January backs up that notion. It calls on the public to address school violence as a health issue — to look at stresses like violence at home and on the streets, as well as the impact of drugs that lead to violent behavior. It also states emphatically that incarcerating teenagers or trying them in adult court for their offenses only makes it more likely that they will become criminals for life.

Yet trying kids as adults is exactly what California voters decided to do when they passed Proposition 21 last year. Now Williams will be tried as an adult for the Santana shootings, and if convicted, he would also serve time in an adult prison thanks to Prop. 21. If he’s convicted, he’ll face more than 500 years in prison.

An unprecedented alliance came together to oppose Prop 21 — including the California Youth Authority and California Juvenile Court Judges, the Parent Teacher Association and the League of Women Voters (organizations that rarely take positions on such issues). But they didn’t defeat it. Early cases show that prosecutors have exercised restraint in moving juvenile cases into the adult court system. And a state court recently struck down a provision that gave prosecutors, rather than judges, the discretion about whether to do so.

But what the future holds for juvenile offenders is uncertain, and school shootings only intensify the hysteria. “There’s been a crisis and now everybody and their grandma seems to come up with a solution, and people are going wildly after these programs,” Juvonen says. “What’s scary about it is not only the money that gets poured into some programs where there’s no proof of their effectiveness, but that when you start probing and questioning some of the underlying assumptions of these programs, you say, why would this ever work?”