BRAZIL EMPLOYS TOOLS OF SPYING TO GUARD ITSELF

MANAUS, Brazil, July 26 - 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 today, though, that shelter is no longer guaranteed. A new
American-financed, $1.4 billion system of radars 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 exactly who is flying through the airspace, whether commercial
aircraft or drug dealers. It will also enable the 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," the minister of defense, Geraldo
Quintao, said on Thursday during a ceremony here inaugurating the system,
which was officially put into operation today. "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 900 listening posts scattered on the ground all over
the Amazon. But its backbone consists of 19 radar stations, 5 airborne
early-warning jets and 3 remote-sensing aircraft, all of which will feed
information via satellite to command centers in this Amazon capital and two
others, Belem and Porto Velho.

"Because this is a radar system, we will be able to operate day and night,
rain or shine," said Gen. Teomar Fonseca Quirico, the project director,
making a contrast with satellites. From a height of 33,000 feet and a
distance of up to 125 miles, he said, the system can track an image of
something as small as a human being.

When first conceived more than a decade ago, the 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 a long war against leftist guerrillas worsening
in Colombia, the military and drug-interdiction aspects of the project have
become more important.

According to a State Department report issued early this year and hotly
debated in Brazil, the United States "is now the only nation clearly
consuming more cocaine than Brazil." A leading drug trafficker in Rio de
Janeiro, Fernandinho Beira Mar, was arrested last year in Colombia in what
authorities called a guns-for-drugs scheme involving left-wing guerrillas.

The United States is already working to monitor the western Amazon to close
it to drug traffickers flying northward from Bolivia and Peru, said Luis
Bittencourt, a Brazilian military analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center in
Washington.

With Brazil building more barriers on the other side, he said, "this could
create an iron circle to impede those flights."

The Brazilian government has said it is willing to share the intelligence
with its neighbors. After inaugurating the project here, President Fernando
Henrique Cardoso flew to Guayaquil, Ecuador, for a conference of South
American presidents that began today where, he said, he would reiterate
that offer and discuss how it might be carried out.

"Brazil is not selfish," Gen. Alberto Cardoso, the government's national
security adviser, said in an interview in Brasilia.

On Monday Colombia's president-elect, Alvaro Uribe, who takes office early
next month, met in Brasilia with the president and with General Cardoso.
Mr. Uribe has vowed to intensify the war against left-wing guerrillas, who
operate in areas bordering Brazil and are also involved in the drug trade.
President Cardoso said "combating narco-traffickers" in the border region
was one of the topics they discussed.

It is less clear, though, to what degree Brazil intends to share
information with the United States. In remarks to reporters after the
inauguration, General Quirico said that as of now, the intelligence-sharing
offer applied "only to Amazon countries, and if the information is to be
passed on to third countries, that is a matter for the Foreign Ministry to
consider."

The radar system is being financed largely with a loan from the United
States Import-Export Bank, with some funds from Sweden. The contract for
the construction was awarded to an American company, the Raytheon Company,
after intense lobbying by the United States. That led to speculation in the
Brazilian press that the radar was really part of an American plot to seize
control of the Amazon and its riches.

To support the system, the Brazilian Air Force plans to deploy as many as
99 aircraft. In 1998 the Brazilian Congress approved legislation permitting
the shooting down of aircraft violating Brazilian airspace. But the
implementing decrees have still not been announced, much to the frustration
of the air force.

"There is no advantage in having a radar system that can see airplanes
transporting drugs and arms, and at the same time being unable to force
those planes to land," Mauro Jose Miranda Gandra, a former air force
minister, said in an interview on Wednesday.

Brazilian officials said one reason for the delay was concern in the United
States that innocent planes could be mistaken for those of drug dealers and
shot down, as occurred in Peru last year. Because much of the radar
technology and software is American-made, Washington fears it could be held
responsible.

General Cardoso said Brazil planned to continue to discuss the issue with
several countries, including the United States. "We have the capacity to
shoot down planes, but it is important that this be properly regulated, and
discussions have been stop-and-go precisely because of the delicacy of the
problem," he said.