BRAZIL SHOWS RAIN-FOREST RADAR

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil unveiled a state-of-the-art radar system yesterday
that is intended to help unlock the mysteries and economic potential of the
vast Amazon region, as well as track down lawbreakers.

President Fernando Henrique Cardoso flew to the jungle city of Manaus to
inaugurate the Amazon Surveillance System, a $1.4 billion network of radar
stations and computers built by defense contractor Raytheon Corp., based in
Lexington, Mass. The system will monitor activity including illegal landing
strips, climatic conditions, and soil composition in the world's largest
wilderness.

The radar system, known as SIVAM, is intended to help protect the Amazon
region from environmental destruction and drug-dealing guerrillas, while
providing data to unlock the area's economic potential.

But environmentalists say that the main focus of SIVAM is national
security, not protection of the wilderness. Most of the information will be
gathered along Brazil's borders, where little deforestation has occurred,
not in the southern Amazon region, where the heaviest logging occurs.

At the command post in Manaus, 1,800 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, a
wall-sized map of Brazil's Amazon region glows with points of light
representing the far-flung radar stations, data collection outposts, and
surveillance airplanes that make up the system.

''With the advent of SIVAM, we will open up a new frontier of progress and
hope in Brazil,'' said Air Force Colonel Paullo Esteves, one of the
program's directors.

The Amazon has thwarted many efforts to tap its riches, which include gold,
diamonds, valuable hardwoods, and a cornucopia of medicinal plants.

''Why didn't anyone invest in the Amazon in the past?'' Esteves asked
rhetorically. ''Because the state wasn't present.''

Today, the 2 million-square-mile wilderness remains a largely lawless
frontier. The government can barely find, much less catch, the illegal
miners, loggers, and drug runners who hop from clandestine air strips
through the jungle and across Brazil's border with Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.

But that could change with SIVAM. With 19 ground-based radar sites and five
airborne tracking systems aboard AWACS-type surveillance planes, operators
can monitor air traffic and even track low-flying drug planes.

Three other planes will monitor events on the ground, such as the
construction of landing strips, illegal mining, and logging, which
destroyed more than 6,000 square miles of rain forest last year alone.

Data from the planes and six satellites will be fed into computers, giving
Brazil a picture of the Amazon region. A technician sitting in front of a
screen can monitor remote border outposts hundreds of miles away, like Sao
Gabriel da Cachoeira, where the radar tower juts above the jungle canopy.

''We can track the entire practice of illicit enterprise,'' Esteves said.

SIVAM is meant to be different from Brazil's previous efforts to establish
a government presence in the area.

In the 1970s, the military dictators then in power carved the Trans- Amazon
highway out of the jungle and urged settlers from the arid Northeast to
move there. Many eventually abandoned the Amazon, and much of the road
today is little more than a muddy track.

A decade later, the armed forces undertook the so-called Northern Rim
project, building scores of border outposts to protect the Amazon, but
doing little to guard the immense and porous jungle borders.

SIVAM has also been questioned by nationalists who fear that the US
government would have access to strategic data. But military and government
officials here say that SIVAM will be entirely in Brazilian hands.