2003 0408 Pasto Narino X

POPAYAN, Colombia — Becoming the fifth victim this year in the U.S. anti-drug war in Colombia, an American pilot was killed Monday when his plane crashed while on a drug-eradication mission in the southwestern department of Narino.

The civilian contractor was piloting a State Department T-65 air tractor when it went down near the city of Pasto, according to a U.S. Embassy official. The plane was spraying fields of opium poppies, the base of heroin, and there was no one else aboard, embassy officials said.

Aerial fumigation of both poppy and coca crops — the latter the raw material of cocaine — is a large portion of the $2-billion aid package known as Plan Colombia that the United States has provided to this country since 1998. The fumigation operations are largely carried out by the civilian contractor DynCorp, which has lost three other pilots since 1997 on such missions. DynCorp spokesman Mike Dickerson in Southern California would not say Monday whether the pilot was a company employee.

U.S. officials, for their part, declined to say whether the crash was an accident or the result of sabotage by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has hit spray planes an estimated 70 times during the last year. The officials said that the pilot died on impact.