BRAZIL BEEFS UP ITS BORDER AS COLOMBIA DRUG WAR LOOMS

TABATINGA, Brazil -- Until recently, this town sitting 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 among army troops, guerrillas and
paramilitary forces on Colombia's side of a largely unmarked, 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
based here. "So this operation was undertaken as a preventive measure, in
anticipation of whatever problems may come our way."

Although it is a modest effort involving 180 police officers, 18 patrol
boats, two airplanes and a helicopter, Operation Cobra is only the most
visible sign that a full-scale militarization of the Amazon and beyond is
under way, 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 every way they can.

Already, refugees from Colombia have been crossing borders to flee the
violence, and guerrilla forces are increasingly coming to see neighboring
countries as safe bases and supply areas for their operations.

But the larger fear is that these problems will only worsen with Plan
Colombia, the official name for 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 exercises 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 Amazon 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 has 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 six mobile
radar posts, was begun in 1997 to monitor deforestation, fires and illegal
mining.

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 to ferry their wares.

"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 Brasilia. "Now, the Sivam project is going to fill that
void and permit us to defend our territory" and "fulfill our responsibility
to protect our airspace."

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," said the American ambassador
to Brazil, Anthony S. Harrington, 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," 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 a long-delayed program
to re-equip its air force.

Over the next eight years, Brazil intends to spend about $3.5 billion to
buy new supersonic fighter planes and troop transport planes and to
refurbish 100 combat jets, with much of the equipment intended for Amazon
service.

Faced with the sweeping scale of both the terrain and the problem,
Brazilian officials are well aware that an effort as modest as Operation
Cobra clearly cannot hope to 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," Cardoso said.

The Brazilian army has stationed 22,000 troops in the Amazon, about 10
percent of its total strength.

But the Brazilian government officially maintains that, in Sposito's words,
"The guerrillas do not exist in Brazil, only narco-traffickers," 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 Brasilia.

Any additional dispatch of troops that may occur, he said, 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 Mitu, a
provincial capital in Colombia just across the border. Colombian troops
were forced to withdraw to Iauarete, a base in Brazilian territory.

Pressures on the Brazilian government to assume a higher profile in the
Amazon will, of course, be likely to 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 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," Cardoso said.