Until the late 1990s, Brazil had only five radars covering the entire Amazon basin—an area the size of Europe—making it one of the world’s biggest blind spots. Heaven help the commercial pilot who wandered off course over the jungle. But flying in the dark has been a blessing to outlaws; on an average day, officials say, 10 or so planes trespass on Amazonian airspace. Most are up to no good, running Colombian cocaine, guns to Marxist guerrillas or cash to be laundered abroad. Then there’s the threat on the ground—farmers, ranchers and loggers who each year fell a chunk of the Amazon the size of Connecticut and then set massive fires to clear the brush. Despite a decade of promising to curb these practices—and catching holy hell from global environmentalists for failing to do so—Brazil has barely been able to make a dent in the destruction.

Now Brazil has invested $1.4 billion in a high-tech weapon against this jungle free-for-all. The country is putting in place one of the most formidable suites of surveillance and telecommunications equipment ever assembled. It’s called the Amazon Vigilance System, or SIVAM, and in size and scope it’s unprecedented in the developing world. It includes two dozen fixed and mobile radars and more than 200 jungle platforms for processing satellite images and weather data. Overhead, eight planes fitted with remote sensing radar and eavesdropping devices will prowl the skies, with a squadron of Supertucano turboprop fighters on call. By late 2003, when all the gadgets are finally wired, officials boast they will be able to hear a tree falling in the forest.

They mean that literally. One of SIVAM’s biggest selling points has been as a means of saving the Amazon from destruction. The pricey system is being billed as a kind of all-purpose high-tech guardian: a tool to plot storms, sniff out minerals underground and allow doctors to map epidemics. In time, a whole network of people and institutions—city halls, police, forest guards, universities, the armed forces—will be wired into SIVAM’s computers and connected to one another by phone, fax and the Internet. They will make up the so-called Amazon Protection System, a sort of civilian counterpart to SIVAM, and they will be entrusted with ensuring the fate of the rain forest and the livelihood of its people. Environmental inspectors will get satellite images that reveal illegal logging or unauthorized development on parks and Indian lands. Radar will help air-traffic controllers spot pilots in trouble or alert police to airborne intruders. At least, that’s the theory.

The controversy swirling around SIVAM, though, has been proportional to its promise. Since the system was first planned in the 1990s, critics have called it an extravagance, a white elephant and a toy for the military. A whiff of scandal still lingers over the deal; rival bidders have accused one another of trying to bribe Brazilian officials to land the contract. Conspiratorial leftists are convinced that the system, built by the U.S. firm Raytheon, will be used by gringos to spy on Brazil. Environmentalists say it is a national-security gimmick camouflaged in green. And yet, despite the criticism, budget cuts throughout the government and even a congressional inquiry into bribery and influence peddling, SIVAM has survived.

Much of the criticism is bunk, but not all. The system will certainly help the Brazilian military monitor air traffic over the jungle and defend the country’s porous borders against guerrillas and foreign intruders. In theory, forestry officials, environmentalists and tropical ecologists will be able to log on to its powerful computers and pull down satellite pictures and real-time data on fires, logging and water pollution. But it remains to be seen whether these authorities will have the money and manpower to use that data to stop the polluters, plunderers and desperate farmers who are tearing down the rain forest. Without constant care and upkeep—and an army of experts trained in the art of culling, analyzing and quickly applying the wealth of data its machines will soon be churning out—the system will be useless. Even as officials put in place the finishing touches on the radar system, they’ve barely begun assembling the most important part of all—the human component. Without competent people to back it up, SIVAM is just a high-tech lookout post with a bird’s-eye view of destruction.

The project is like Brazil itself: big, powerful and awkward, with vast promise and equally vast problems. “The biggest and most sophisticated ecological safeguard system in the world,” purrs the sonorous voice on the slick SIVAM promo video, which features brilliantly colored macaws and lots of little furry animals. Its radars are billed as a kind of redemption—a high-tech deus ex machina that will snatch the rain forest from the teeth of ruin. When Fernando Henrique Cardoso unveiled the system in a gala event last July, splashing champagne over the nose of a sleek new spy plane, he sounded less like Brazil’s president than a general launching a national rescue mission. “A lot of people talk about sovereignty,” he told a hall full of dignitaries in Manaus, a river port 1,000km up the Amazon. “What is important is exercising sovereignty. And that’s what we are doing today.”

For more than a century, hardly a Brazilian leader in pinstripes or epaulettes has missed a chance to let the world know who is the boss of the rain forest. But at best, Brazil has been an absentee landlord, vacillating between concern and disinterest. Now that authorities are paying attention, they see a leafy no man’s land, rotten with unwanted strangers and a steady source of bad news. Just ask Mauro Sposito, head of Brazil’s Amazon anti-drug task force, Operation Cobra. For three years running, his federal police agents have shadowed Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas along the Colombian border, dynamited dozens of clandestine jungle airstrips and seized hundreds of tons of marijuana, cocaine and, more recently, heroin. “Today, Amazonia is Brazil’s biggest security priority,” he says.

The Amazon was supposed to be Brazil’s great promise, rather than its weakest flank. With a restless population and continental appetite, South America’s largest nation has long looked to its backlands with a mixture of awe and avarice. A quarter of the world’s fresh water sluices through the Amazon’s placentalike basin. Its tropical hardwoods fetch handsome prices in European and U.S. furniture boutiques. Precious gems and minerals—iron ore, gold, emeralds and diamonds—are there for the taking.

But Amazonia is also Brazil’s recurring nightmare. Though this nation has no external enemies and owns an uncontested 70 percent of the South American rain forest, Brazilians have been haunted for centuries by the specter of losing it. “Amazonia and International Greed,” Arthur Ferreira Cesar Reis’s early-20th-century philippic, was the centerpiece of this worried canon. “Integrar para no entregar” (“Settle the Amazon so as not to surrender it to others”) was the battle cry of the military government through the 1970s. That cry still echoes today. Not long ago the Amazon regional newspaper, O Liberal, held an essay contest for public-high-school students. Gutemberg Melo won top prize for his entry: “Americans Invade Amazonia.”

Technology alone won’t ease all those fears. The spanking-new SIVAM gadgetry—the radars, weather antennae and floating water monitors—stands in glaring contrast to the bare-bones realities of the other institutions charged with using the surveillance network to protect the Amazon. But in its budgeting priorities, SIVAM hasn’t given these organizations much to work with. When the project was proposed in the late 1990s, the government promised a mere $5 million for the National Amazon Research Institute, in Manaus, a center for research on Amazonian plants and animals. In exchange, the institute was asked to gather all its separate strands of research into a unified digital databank, which would in turn be fed into the surveillance system’s computers. By last year, before any funds had been allocated, the budget had dwindled to $500,000. When even that reduced sum was withdrawn, the scientists settled for donated equipment. “We have less money today than 24 years ago, when I first came to the Amazon,” says tropical ecologist Philip Fearnside. Today the institute is struggling to create the computerized databank—and paying for the work out of its own dwindling resources.

Brasilia’s answer to the scientists is curt but clear. “SIVAM is not a tool for scientific research,” says Luiz Gylvan Meira Filho, science-policy chief for Brazil’s Science and Technology Ministry. “It was created so the government can better carry out its job of protecting the Amazon region.” Fair enough, except that in order to defend the rain forest, officials must not only be able to gather information but understand and process what pops up on the satellite images and the radar screens. That is a task for experts: meteorologists to analyze the weather patterns, technicians to read remote sensing data, forestry inspectors who can quickly spot fires in satellite images. Brazilian universities boast a corps of capable tropical scientists, but precious few are in the Amazon and most are overwhelmed with their own research obligations. Until now little thought has been given to how to deploy them within SIVAM. “The technology is in place,” says Thelma Krug, senior adviser to Meira. “But even the best equipment will do little good if you don’t have people in place who are trained to interpret and quickly act upon the information the system will gather. This is still a huge challenge.”

No expense was spared on SIVAM hardware, but efforts to assemble and integrate this wider network have been given short shrift. Most of the institutions that will have to be involved—the Indian Affairs Agency, universities, state environmental authorities, nongovernmental organizations and so on—are barely able to pay their bills, much less meet the new demands that the vigilance system will place upon them. “I can’t see how SIVAM is going to provide data on burnings, deforestation and environmental impact in the Amazon better and more timely than what we already have,” says a top government scientist. “To me this is science fiction.”

With the Brazilian economy flat, enforcement is another trouble spot. With only one field inspector for every Jamaica-size swath of rain forest—and a $20 million budget shortfall this year—the federal environmental authority will have a hard time running down illegal loggers the eyes in the sky may spot. Federal police, too, need at least 400 Amazon-based agents—four times the current staffing—in order to interdict drugrunners. This year the Army was forced to shed 44,000 recruits, and the Air Force had to ground its planes for weeks at a time. “We don’t even know if the [SIVAM] planes are going to have fuel to fly,” says one government official.

Then there are challenges that not even money can sort out. Everyone agrees that society must tread lightly in the rain forest. But how lightly? How much of the Amazon should be left untouched and how much turned into a garden to till and sow? “The Agricultural Ministry wants development, the land-reform program puts settlers in Brazil nut groves and [the environmental agency] wants preservation,” says Alfredo Homma, an agronomist at the federal agricultural research center, Embrapa. “The fact is, Brasilia doesn’t know what it wants to do with the Amazon.”

Saving the rain forest may turn out to be a far bigger challenge for Brazil than establishing sovereignty. For all the fretting, Amazonia is still more coveted than loved, a landscape to conquer rather than cherish. Five hundred years after European explorers first plied its waters, the Amazon is still, to most Brazilians, little more than a big green smudge on the atlas. That’s not something a fancy radar will fix.

Note: Brazil is building a fancy new system of radars that, for the first time, gives it a bird’s-eye view of what goes on within its borders. But can technology alone save the rain forest?

Newsweek International October 28 Issue

Source: Newsweek International
Author: Mac Margolis, NewsWeek
Published: October 28 Issue
Copyright: 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
Contact: editors@newsweek.com
Website: http://www.newsweek.com/

Related Articles & Web Site:

SIVAM
http://www.sivam.gov.br/

Brazil Unleashes Amazon Watchdog
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread13549.shtml

by Dana Larsen (21 Oct, 2002) 10,000 Ecuadoreans harmed by herbicides

Residents of a small village in Ecuador have filed a class-action lawsuit against Dyncorp, the American company contracted to spray herbicides onto coca plantations in Colombia.

A report in the Dallas Morning News revealed that the Ecuador government is backing the lawsuit, filed in a Washington DC court. The lawsuit was launched by the small village of San Francisco 2, near the Colombian border.

A report by the environmental group Ecological Action claims that 10,000 Ecuadoreans have been harmed by the spraying, and that over 90% of all farmers living within six miles of the border report symptoms including respiratory problems, headaches, severe skin sores and intestinal bleeding.

The aerial spraying is financed by the US government, with personnel and expertise supplied under contract by Dyncorp. The planes spray Roundup Ultra, made by the Monsanto Company.