Perhaps the most interesting part of the contract deals with Bolivia, a country where DynCorp's activities have gone virtually unacknowledged and undocumented. Operating out of a main base at Santa Cruz and forward operating locations (FOLs) in Puerto Suarez, Chimore and Trinidad--as well as at staging areas in San Matia, Riberalta, San Ignaci and Via Montes--DynCorp's contractors both train mechanics and do maintenance work themselves on twelve State Department UH-IH ("Huey") helicopters, and another ten Hueys provided by the Pentagon.

Used to transport troops to coca laboratories--as well as to fly reconnaissance missions--some Hueys belong to the Red Devil Task Force (RDTF), a little-known special unit of the Bolivian Air Force funded by the US government. According to the contract, DynCorp is "responsible for the military support, aircraft maintenance quality control and standardization of flight training for the RDTF," the latter including "some individual flight training" by DynCorp pilots. According to a recently retired DynCorp contractor, the company's pilots work with Red Devil pilots "day in and day out, hand in hand, on everything from keeping the log book to refueling, and are still actively training those pilots."

"I think this confirms the general sense that we have too little information about the kind of counternarcotics contract operations being carried out in the Andean region," says Gina Amatangelo, international narcotics fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. Amatangelo says she'd be particularly interested to know if any DynCorp personnel working with the RDTF have flown for the government's Umopar mobile eradication unit, which has a documented history of human rights abuses.

In Colombia, DynCorp is required to support Bell 212 helicopter operations "seven days a week, twelve hours a day, in day, night, and NVG [night vision goggles] conditions." Operations include "search and rescue, host nation training, interdiction, command and control, and reconnaissance missions," specifically at two FOLs.

And there is no shortage of FOLs: In addition to the main base at El Dorado International Airport, DynCorp's personnel can apparently be found flitting between eight forward locations at La Remonta, Neiva, Apaiy Meta, Puerto Asis, San Jos&ecute;, Tulua, Valledupar and Larandia. (According to the contract, there's also a maintenance base in Guaymaral, a training base under construction in Mariquita and three more forward bases planned for Florencia, Tres Aquines and Turbo.) The main mission continues to be "aerial opium poppy and coca reconnaissance and eradication" with fixed-wing T-65s and OV-10D Broncos--planes flown by both DynCorp pilots and their traineees, and maintained by DynCorp mechanics.

In Peru, as in Colombia and Bolivia, the State Department has instructed DynCorp to "collect, process, and disseminate aerial eradication flight path and spray data from 'Pathlink' [and/or] 'SATLOC'"--two high-tech recording and mapping systems--"to facilitate planning and analysis of aerial eradication and reconnaissance operations on deployment." This is particularly interesting since last month, after the Bowers shootdown, DynCorp spokeswoman Charlene Wheeless told reporters via e-mail that she wanted to "assure you that DynCorp does not provide surveillance services" in its areas of operation, especially Peru. When contacted by The Nation, another DynCorp spokeswoman, Janet Wineriter, clarified the statement, saying "We were speaking strictly about tracking aircraft." (When asked to comment on other aspects of the contract, Wineriter said that "I've never even seen the contract myself," but added that she was sure if it had been obtained from the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, "You would certainly get it redacted.")

But in Peru, DynCorp does much, much more. In addition to having a presence at a large US government compound in Pucallpa, as a recent Washington Post reporter noted, DynCorp also operates at forward locations including Tingo Maria, Santa Lucia, Mazamari and Tarapoto. For herbicide spraying, DynCorp has to be able to have four T-65s or four OV-10s simultaneously airborne, and has to both maintain the aircraft, train mechanics and train pilots both individually and as a unit.

According to a recently retired DynCorp veteran, while the company's people are "of the highest caliber--Delta guys, SEAL team guys, career military pilots and mechanics," most of the knowledge and experience they have isn't being passed on in training, insuring that the DynCorp contractors constantly operate in a very hands-on capacity. "It's probably one of the hardest things to put up with, because there's no perfect area or classroom to train people when they come in, and a lot of times they're in and then they move out, so you start over with new people, and then they move out," he says. "You always have the mission to adhere to first, and the mission is maintaining and flying those aircraft to spray and kill crops."

The veteran also says that DynCorp personnel have been tasked with rescuing army personnel whose missions may not be counternarcotics related. Not, he says, that the contractors mind. "Most people stay until they're ready to go, because they really like what they're doing. The contract is constantly changing to fulfill new requirements, so there will always be work." He pauses. "I haven't been down there in awhile, but in the time I worked for 'em, we went from having 120 people to 450 people."

For University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy, the contract harks back to the days of his book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, originally published in 1972. "One of these days we may actually get all the records describing everything the CIA did in Laos, but we'll never get the records of the Continental Air Service, their contractor who worked there," he says. "The fact that this company is so large and is doing so much down there raises real questions of accountability. What's the relationship between the nominal drug war and the realities of counterinsurgency? If it's just the drug war, it raises questions about whether or not this is the best way to handle it, whether it's cost effective, what the consequences are. But the operations described here can very easily spill into involvement in counterinsurgency. And the worst-case scenario would be that we could become embroiled in a de facto counterinsurgency situation, because this is a privately held corporation for which there's no particular restraint."

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