A GIANT EYE ON THE AMAZON

MANAUS · Towering above the treetops near the Amazon's winding Rio Negro, a
gigantic spinning radar points skyward, obscuring a splendid view of puffy
white clouds. In a control room miles away, technicians sit transfixed to
computer screens, gathering and analyzing the information the radar collects.

The radar is only one piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle of some of the most
advanced surveillance technology that will attempt to provide an electronic
view of the darkest reaches of the planet's largest and most mysterious
rain forest.

Designed by Massachusetts-based Raytheon Co., the system will employ 19
fixed and six transportable radar stations, along with surveillance
airplanes and other high-tech tools, that essentially will give Brazilian
officials the equivalent of a giant microscope to observe what is happening
on the jungle floor and in the sky over the Amazon.

It will watch about 2 million square miles, more than half the area of the
United States.

More than a decade in the making, the $1.4 billion project known as SIVAM,
for System for the Vigilance of the Amazon, is only weeks from its official
inauguration.

Experts say Brazil's high-tech effort is unique, the most ambitious attempt
to date to better monitor, protect and understand the Amazon, a beautiful
but lawless jungle frontier exploited by drug traffickers, illegal loggers
and clandestine land-clearing that turns the sky into a red smoky haze
during the burning season.

Particularly for Brazil, already losing its drug war and fighting the
threat of neighboring Colombia's leftist rebels crossing into Brazilian
territory, launching the high-tech program also will monitor regions where
there is no military control.

"This is a very bold proposal," said air force Lt. Col. Jurandyr Fonseca, a
spokesman and coordinator of the SIVAM program. "It is an attempt by the
Brazilian government to try to bring the various government agencies
together to protect the Amazon."

Low-flying cocaine smuggling aircraft will have a harder time hiding over
the dense jungle carpet because specially designed surveillance planes and
air traffic control radars will be able to track their movements.

Satellites and other special aircraft also will monitor land use, identify
deforestation and track raging forest fires. The new web of technology can
even help battle epidemics by allowing health officials to monitor the
geographic spread of disease across remote jungle regions.

Environmentalists say SIVAM also provides Brazil with a unique opportunity
to improve its image as a poor protector of a rain forest that boasts the
widest biodiversity on the planet.

The Amazon region covers 60 percent of Brazilian territory, parts of seven
other countries and is still largely a steamy wilderness.

But the big-ticket satellite project also has raised troubling questions
that expose some of Brazil's traditional failures in preserving the Amazon.

"No one who is concerned about what is going on in the Amazon can
rationally be against better data and the government having a greater
capacity to control and measure what is going on in the Amazon," said Steve
Schwartzman, a senior researcher with the Environmental Defense Fund in
Washington, D.C.

"But ... for many years the Brazilian government had a great deal of
information about many misuses of the Amazon, such as deforestation, and
did nothing about it."

Niro Higuchi, a forestry expert at the National Amazon Research Institute,
points out that technology is only one part of the solution.

"If [Brazilian government officials] don't improve in this area of human
resources, they will simply have lots of information that is never acted
upon," Higuchi said.

"We cannot win the war against the Amazon crimes unless we harness the
potential of this system," Fonseca said.

Patrice M. Jones writes for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Co. newspaper.