July 25, 2002

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - Brazil unveiled a state-of-the-art radar system Thursday that it hopes will help unlock the mysteries and economic potential of the vast Amazon 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 U.S. defense contractor Raytheon Corp. that will track everything from illegal landing strips to climatic conditions to soil composition in the world's largest wilderness.

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

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

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

Since the first Spanish conquistadores came searching for the legendary land of Eldorado, the Amazon has thwarted efforts to tap its riches, including gold, diamonds, valuable hardwoods and a cornucopia of medicinal plants that some scientists believe could hold the key to curing diseases such as AIDS.

"Why didn't anyone invest in the Amazon in the past?" Esteves asks 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. 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," says Esteves.

SIVAM is a big change from Brazil's previous efforts to even begin to get a state presence in the Amazon.

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 U.S. government would have access to strategic data. But Brazilian military and government officials say SIVAM will be entirely in national hands.

Environmentalists say that despite claims to the contrary, 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 where the heaviest logging occurs.

"Well, I think we should make use of whatever data that comes from it," says Philip Fearnside, an American specialist in deforestation working with the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus. "But if you were going to invest a lot of money in the environment you probably wouldn't invest in SIVAM."

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