RUNNING DRUGS DOWN THE AMAZON

Brazil's biggest interdiction operation on the Colombian border employs just
six officers By Iain Bruce in Tabatinga, Brazil

Tabatinga looks and feels like a typical frontier town.

Ask people about drug trafficking and they look at you twice, then deny it's
a problem any longer.

But stay on a bit, and some of them begin to open up.

"It's not something we talk about to strangers," says one.

"There's nothing else to do here," says another.

"It's really out of control," adds a third.

Fuel tank haul

Just down river is the Federal Police's Aznol Base - their highest profile
interdiction operation on the border.

Here all vessels travelling down the Amazon further into Brazil have to stop
and be searched.

They show me the 28 kilos of cocaine they dug out of a ferry boat's fuel
tank the day before.

But with just six police agents here at any one time, their presence seems
largely symbolic.

The base commander himself takes me round the back and points out how
determined traffickers can easily stop a little way up stream, carry their
merchandise through a few kilometres of jungle, then reload further down
river.

Not to mention the 1,000km of frontier with Colombia stretching north from
here.

It's thick rainforest, crossed by at least three major river systems, with
dozens of tributaries - and there is no police presence at all.

Colombian rebels

Only the Brazilian army has a handful of border posts carved out of the
jungle.

The US Government would like to see Brazilian soldiers joining the war on
drugs along this frontier, just as it would like Brazil to co-operate with
military actions against the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), who control most of the territory on the Colombian side of
the border.

But Brazil is resisting.

The army says its role, as defined by the Brazilian Constitution, does not
include policing the drugs trade.

Nor does it believe that the FARC represent any threat to Brazilian
sovereignty.

Nationalists of both the left and the right, including some highly placed
officers in Brazil's military hierarchy, say they fear the drugs issue is
being used by Washington as a pretext to justify an increasing international
presence right across Amazonia.