LATEST BATTLEGROUND IN LATIN DRUG WAR - BRAZILIAN AMAZON

TABATINGA, 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 Brasilia 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 Para. 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 Vaupes,
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 Brasilia. 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 Mitu, a provincial
capital in Colombia just across the border, forcing Colombian troops to
withdraw to Iauarete, a base in Brazilian territory.

A Colombian official said recently that Colombian forces were able to retake
Mitu 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," Raul 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.