ABATINGA, Brazil — Until recently, this town on the
corner of the frontiers of Brazil, Peru and Colombia was one of
the most sleepy, remote and overlooked parts of the Amazon. But
that was before the fighting upriver by army troops, guerrillas
and paramilitary forces on Colombia's side of the 1,021-mile
border started to intensify.
Suddenly, the Brazilian government is stepping up river
patrols and air surveillance and destroying clandestine
airstrips, driven by a concern that the $1.3 billion the United
States has promised Colombia to bolster its army may further
fuel the long war against drug traffickers and their guerrilla
allies and send it spilling into Brazil.
"We know that once the gringos have strengthened the army's
hand there, we may get whacked too," said Mauro Sposito, head of
the new Brazilian force here. "So this operation was undertaken
as a preventive measure, in anticipation of whatever problems
may come our way."
Although a modest effort, the new Brazilian campaign is only
the most visible sign that a full-scale militarization of the
Amazon and beyond is underway as Colombia's war threatens to
draw in its neighbors. From Panama to Bolivia, governments and
armies are girding for the worst by strengthening their defense
forces in every way they can.
The operation, involving 180 police officers, 18 patrol
boats, 2 airplanes and a helicopter, is part of Brazil's
expanding attempt to steel itself against the spillover effects
already being felt in the region. Refugees fleeing the violence
in Colombia have been crossing borders, and guerrilla forces who
work in symbiosis with drug traffickers are increasingly coming
to see neighboring countries as safe bases and supply areas.
The larger fear is that the problems will only deepen with
the American-financed program to aid Colombia's army, a force
with a lackluster record on human rights and in the battlefield.
Peru and Venezuela have stepped up troop deployments along
their borders with Colombia. And Ecuador, by far the weakest
country in the area, has said it will seek an aid package of its
own from Washington. But it is Brazil that has sovereignty over
the largest and most vulnerable piece of the world's biggest
jungle, and it is Brazil that is now engaged in the most
ambitious, extensive and costly effort to occupy and defend its
sparsely populated frontiers.
For Latin America's largest country that focus marks a
historic shift in priorities. Throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries, Brazil was focused on its southern border with
Argentina, where the biggest concentrations of troops and
military equipment have always been deployed, and largely
neglected its northern borders.
The key to the beefed-up Brazilian effort in the Amazon,
which accounts for 60 percent of the country's territory, is a
$1.4 billion radar project called the Amazon Vigilance System,
known as Sivam, from its acronym in Portuguese.
The American-financed system, which consists of 19 fixed and
6 mobile radar posts, was begun in 1997 to monitor
deforestation, fires and illegal mining. But it has taken on
great military significance with the deteriorating situation in
Colombia, and is now considered a vital tool by both Brazilian
and American officials to track the movements of guerrilla and
drug operations, which often use small private aircraft.
"We have all of Brazilian airspace controlled, except for the
Amazon," Gen. Alberto Cardoso, the government's national
security minister, explained in an interview in Brasília early
this month. "Now, the Sivam project is going to fill that void
and permit us to defend our territory." In mid-October, Brazil
offered to share data gathered from Sivam with neighbors and the
United States. "With Sivam and our own electronic intelligence
gathering capacity, I expect to see us working together and
sharing information in an unprecedented fashion so that we can
each benefit from what we know and need to know about drug
trafficking activity," the American Ambassador to Brazil,
Anthony S. Harrington, said in a recent interview.
In 1998, the Brazilian Congress approved legislation that
would allow the Air Force to shoot down any aircraft that enters
Brazilian airspace illegally. Peru and Colombia have similar
laws, but "ours is broader," General Cardoso said, and "has to
be regulated by a decree that is still being discussed, due to
the sensitivity of the problem," before it can be put into
effect.
As part of its effort to control the sky over the often
impenetrable jungle, the Brazilian government has also announced
that it intends to spend about $3.5 billion during the next
eight years to buy new supersonic fighter planes and transport
planes. It will also refurbish 100 combat jets.
The buildup is intended to remedy a vulnerability that Brazil
was reminded of last year, when a plane on its way from
neighboring Suriname made an emergency landing in the eastern
Amazon state of Pará. An inspection revealed a cargo of arms,
which Brazilian law enforcement officials say were apparently
destined for guerrillas in Colombia in exchange for cocaine that
would be shipped to Europe.
This kind of network of arms for drug transfers is so vast,
organized and entrenched that the strongman who has dominated
Suriname for nearly 20 years, Desi Bouterse, is facing drug
trafficking charges in the Netherlands, Suriname's former
colonial power.
In addition, the Brazilian press, citing police sources, has
accused the Surinamese Embassy of involvement in the arms
shipment, but the Surinamese ambassador refused to testify in a
recent congressional investigation into drug trafficking, citing
his diplomatic status.
More recently, in July, two small planes from Suriname were
detected in Brazilian airspace and managed to land at a
clandestine airstrip in Vaupés, Colombia, where they unloaded
what officials suspect was a cargo of arms for the guerrillas
before Colombian troops could locate the planes and blow them
up.
Faced with the sweeping scale of the terrain and the problem,
Brazilian officials are well aware that an effort as modest as
theirs cannot eliminate such traffic. "Our border with Colombia
is more than 1,000 miles long, so extensive and with an area of
jungle so inhospitable that even if we multiplied by 10 or 15
the forces deployed there, we would still be short of people,"
General Cardoso said.
The Brazilian Army has 22,000 troops permanently stationed in
the Amazon, about 10 percent of its total strength. But the
government officially maintains that, in Mr. Sposito's words,
"the guerrillas do not exist in Brazil, only narcotraffickers,"
and has made it clear that it intends to keep its forces as far
removed as possible from the combat in Colombia.
"Brazil is not willing to send units of the army or the
police to fight alongside their Colombian counterparts, whether
against the guerrillas or narcotics traffickers," Minister of
Foreign Affairs Luiz Felipe Lampreia said in a recent interview
in Brasília. Any additional dispatch of troops that may occur,
he added, will be intended exclusively "to strengthen our
military presence on the border in order to defend and safeguard
our frontier."
But Brazil is already peripherally involved in the Colombian
conflict. Late in 1998, Colombia's main left- wing guerrilla
group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
attacked and briefly held Mitú, a provincial capital in Colombia
just across the border, forcing Colombian troops to withdraw to
Iauaretê, a base in Brazilian territory.
A Colombian official said recently that Colombian forces were
able to retake Mitú by counterattacking partly from Brazil. But
when General Cardoso was asked about the incident, he disagreed,
saying that "there were many wounded, who for purely
humanitarian reasons were treated in our hospital" and that
after an exchange of diplomatic notes Brazil obtained "a
Colombian commitment that such a thing would not happen again."
The main concern of both governments is a remote and sparsely
populated region, known as the Dog's Head, where neither
government has much of a presence, spawning fears that guerrilla
groups or drug traffickers may be tempted to fill the
vacuum.
FARC leaders say they are not active in Brazil and do not
plan to be. "Our struggle is in Colombia," so "Brazil can rest
assured that there will be no incursions," Raúl Reyes, a rebel
spokesman, said in August. But Colombian and American officials
say the rebels take that position only because Brazil is more
useful to them at the moment as a rear supply base. As Brazilian
officials acknowledge, rebels regularly cross the border to buy
food and medicine at accessible border settlements where they do
not fear capture.
"There is no way to block supplies legally acquired in our
country and then transported to Colombian territory," General
Cardoso said. "The people doing the buying don't say they are
guerrillas, so how are you going to prohibit a shopowner from
selling his products to them?"
Brazil is also growing in importance as a source of the
precursor chemicals used to manufacture cocaine. Manaus, nearly
1,000 miles downriver from here, is an important industrial
center, and Colombian units that have raided cocaine
laboratories say they often find labels in Portuguese indicating
that the chemicals came from Brazil.
"We've had candid discussions about this, and Brazil is aware
of the problem and focused on doing something about it, but they
have a huge territory to cover," Mr. Harrington said. "You can't
station men all over the Amazon and watch for cement bags coming
through," he added, so Brazil plans to "examine and identify the
companies that are involved in this business."
Pressures on Brazil to assume a higher profile in the Amazon
will, of course, likely require more money and a larger
commitment of security forces. But in contrast to a decade ago,
when resentment of 21 years of military dictatorship still
lingered, it is clear that popular support for such a buildup is
now a certainty.
"If there is one positive aspect to the emergence of these
problems with Plan Colombia, it is that all of society has now
awakened to the necessity of the defense of the Amazon," General
Cardoso said.
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