NEW RADAR WILL HELP BRAZIL CURTAIL SMUGGLING

MANAUS, Brazil - For as long as Brazil has been a nation, outlaws of every
type, from gold smugglers and slave traders to drug traffickers and gun
runners, have taken refuge in the Amazon, the world's largest jungle
wilderness, secure in the knowledge that they could not be tracked down.

As of Friday, though, that shelter is no longer guaranteed. A new
American-financed, $1.4 billion system of radar and sensors has begun
monitoring activity in a 1.9 million-square-mile area of trackless rain
forest and rivers that is larger than half the continental United States.

The system is so sophisticated and comprehensive that Brazilian officials
now boast they can hear a twig snap anywhere in the Amazon.

The Amazon Surveillance System will allow Brazil to determine for the first
time who exactly is flying through the airspace, whether commercial
aircraft or drug dealers. It will also enable Brazilian authorities to
track illegal logging and deforestation more efficiently, detect foreign
guerrilla incursions, protect Indian lands, and inhibit the smuggling of
rare and endangered animal and plant species.

"This is a historic moment for Brazil," Minister of Defense Geraldo Quintao
said on Thursday during a ceremony here inaugurating the system, which was
officially put into operation on Friday. "It transcends the simple
unveiling of a government project," he said, allowing Latin America's
largest country to "protect our land borders, preserve our natural riches
and make the state a presence in our most remote areas."

The system includes a network of about 900 listening posts scattered on the
ground all over the Amazon. But its backbone consists of 19 fixed radar
stations, five airborne early warning jets and three remote sensoring
aircraft, all of which will feed information via satellite to command
centers in this Amazon capital and two others, Belem and Porto Velho.

When first conceived more than a decade ago, the radar system was meant to
answer growing foreign criticism that Brazil was not doing enough to
protect the Amazon's delicate environment. But with cocaine production
exploding in surrounding countries and the worsening of the long war
against leftist guerrillas in Colombia, the military and drug interdiction
aspects of the project have become more important.