On Thursday, a legal consultant to the Peruvian air force said the two Peruvian pilots who shot down the plane will be tried in military court for crimes committed while carrying out orders.
Abraham Ramirez said investigators are still trying to determine the specific charges. The pilots--a major and a lieutenant--have not been named.
No disciplinary action has been taken against anyone who was in the CIA surveillance plane or command-and-control centers taking part from military ground stations in Peru and Key West, Fla., officials said.
Similar U.S.-led airborne radar surveillance of drug-trafficking regions along the Peru-Colombia border have been suspended pending a National Security Council review.
Despite the suspension, "the information we have does not indicate an upsurge" of drug flights in the area, said Rand Beers, an assistant secretary of State who headed the U.S. side of the investigation.
Beers said drug runners have learned to use ground routes and ships over the last five years to avoid the anti-narcotics flights that have downed at least 38 suspected drug planes and led to 22 deaths, including those of Bowers and her daughter.
The language in the investigative report is diplomatic but damning nonetheless.
It concludes that implementation of the U.S.-Peru operating agreement "became less detailed and explicit" as time went on. Joint training of air crews similarly "utilized an abbreviated set of procedures" without authorization.
Thus, the Peruvian officer sought and received orders from his superiors to shoot down the suspect plane before anyone had checked the plane's identifying tail number. "It was not clear who was responsible for identifying the tail number or when," Beers said.
And the report cites the "language limitations" of the Peruvian and American participants. The Americans are not required to speak Spanish, Beers said, and the Peruvian liaison clearly wasn't fluent in English.
As a result, the transcript may be misleading, Beers warned. "Even if you hear a 'yes,' it doesn't mean that person understood what was said," he explained.
Indeed, the sequence would be comical in places if not for the resulting tragedy. The Americans joke about where they are, repeatedly curse out ground commanders on their intercom and correct one another's pidgin Spanish.
