ECUADOR: Mysterious Crashes Across Colombian Border

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Kintto Lucas

QUITO, Jan 31 2002 (IPS) - Authorities in Ecuador have no clear answers regarding two air accidents just across the Colombian border, that left a death toll of 120 this month. The two planes, with highly experienced crews, were both off course when they crashed.

A Boeing 727-100 belonging to the TAME airlines, which took off from Quito in the directon of Tulcan, on Ecuador’s northern border, was 45 kilometres off course Monday when it smashed into the Cumbal volcano in the Andes mountains in the southwestern Colombian department of Nariño, 4,764 metres above sea level, killing all 94 people on board.

On Jan 17, a Fairchild plane belonging to the state-run oil company Petroecuador, flying from Quito to Lago Agrio, an oil town in Ecuador’s northeastern border region, was 50 kilometres from its normal route when it crashed into a jungle-covered hillside in Colombia. All 26 people on board died.

In both cases, air traffic controllers lost radio contact with the planes just after the pilots asked for permission to land.

There are certain coincidences between the two accidents that are inexplicable, said the director of the Office of Civil Aviation of Ecuador, César Naranjo. “The two cases are similar and very difficult to understand,” he said.

The Petroecuador plane was in good condition and its crew was highly trained, said Naranjo. “It inexplicably took the wrong course,” crossed into Colombian airspace and crashed “head-on against the El Tigre hillside. This is something that defies all explanation,” he said.

Both accidents “have certain similar characteristics,” having occurred “just before the planes were to land,” and after they had “incomprehensibly strayed from their routes,” said Defence Minister Hugo Unda.

“The characteristics of these two accidents make it difficult to determine the causes,” said Unda, who added that it was necessary to await the results of the investigations.

Talking to local media outlets in Ecuador like the newspaper El Universo and the La Luna radio station, military sources, relatives of the victims and Petroecuador employees mentioned the possibility that the planes had been mistakenly shot down by one of Colombia’s guerrilla groups.

They also speculated that the planes could have been hijacked and forced to deviate from their routes and head towards a clandestine airstrip.

Clandestine airstrips used by the small airplanes operated by drug traffickers are said to lie behind the El Tigre hillside.

Edgar Moscoso, the governor of the northern Ecuadorean province of Carchi, the capital of which is Tulcan – the destination of the TAME airliner – said various hypotheses on the accident were being studied, and that the possibility of a hijacking had not been ruled out.

Reports by authorities are contradictory, and the families of the victims are calling for a thorough investigation to determine whether the planes may have been shot down or hijacked.

Government Minister Marcelo Merlo, who ruled out the possibility that the TAME airliner was the target of a hijacking or attack, said it was hard to believe that the Petroecuador plane was off course due to human or technical error.

Both planes exploded on impact, and the bodies of the victims were unrecognisable. The only way to identify them is by searching for documents at the crash sites.

In neither of the two cases has the black box, or flight data recorder, been found, and it is practically impossible to recover the bodies, reported authorities from Ecuador and Colombia. The crash sites may be declared cemeteries.

“There are pieces of bodies all over the place. Parts of the plane are scattered over one kilometre,” said Joli Hernández, the Secretary of Health of Cumbal, the town nearest the place where the TAME airplane went down.

The crew of the Petroecuador plane was totally familiar with the route it covered daily between Quito and Lago Agrio, the capital of the Amazon jungle province of Sucumbios, according to aeronautic authorities.

When the Jan 17 crash occurred, the weather was excellent and the plane was in good shape, according to the mechanics. But 10 minutes before it was to land in Lago Agrio, the plane mysteriously flew 50 kilometres north of its route, crashing into the El Tigre hillside.

The crew of the TAME Boeing 727-100 was also highly experienced, and regularly covered the Quito-Tulcan-Cali route. The plane was in tip-top shape, according to Boeing, and no one can explain what might have happened in the three minutes before it was to land.

Boeing officials explained that to land in Tulcan, planes must loop a few kilometres into Colombian airspace before turning back towards the airport in Ecuador. The question, they said, was what was the plane doing 45 kilometres off course, in Colombian territory?

Just a few kilometres from El Tigre, a U.S. RC-7B military plane crashed in August 2000. The crash only came to light as part of an investigation by U.S. reporters into supposed undercover U.S. operations in Colombian territory.

And last April, a Peruvian air force fighter-bomber shot down a small plane carrying U.S. missionaries, based on intelligence data provided by a U.S. aircraft.

According to The New York Times, the plane carrying the missionaries was mistaken for an airplane used in the drug trade.

Local residents along the Ecuadorean-Colombian border near Lago Agrio fear that the small Petroecuador plane might have suffered the same fate as either the RC-7B military aircraft or the plane carrying the missionaries.

The National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, is active in the area where the TAME plane crashed.

In the area where the Petroecuador plane went down, the main rebel organisation, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is involved in combat with the army and the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Drug trafficking gangs also operate in the area.

Ecuador’s single-chamber parliament announced the creation of a commission to investigate the accidents, in order to “guarantee transparency.”

“We will have to investigate why the accidents both took place in Colombian territory,” said one lawmaker.