Brazil's New Eye on the Amazon
Ballvé, Marcelo
The gleaming military installation rises from the patchy forests surrounding Bel6m, a city of one million people in Brazil's eastern Amazon Delta. The building's futuristic design seems out...
...A Brazilian Navy Admiral put it to me this way: "In Brazil we are 100 years behind the United States...
...SIVAM] will allow us to monitor to see that only permitted activities are taking place, and we will be able to evaluate that with images," he said, rapping his fists on a table to emphasize the incontestable nature of photographic evidence, which could alert officials about illegal logging, planting, burning or mining...
...In 1905, Euclides da Cunha compared the Amazon to the rugged society of California's gold-rush days in the mid-19th Century...
...Euclides wrote that justice was nonexistent and violence the dominant factor in human relations...
...European and ping Brazil U.S...
...What's more, many Brazilians, inside and outside the military, see increased control over and exploitation of the Amazon's resources as a form of "manifest destiny"-and see SIVAM as an aid to fulfilling that destiny...
...It's false to say that SIVAM is a scientific project," he said...
...It took us a long the ongoing military-led attempts to exercise control time just to push back the jungle," said Ismael over the region and "civilize" it will simply lead to Pereira, a civil engineer overseeing the site...
...Brazilians bristle at these types of statements, implying they are not competent to manage this key center of biodiversity...
...Naval War College and an adviser to the Pentagon, wrote an article for Esquire Magazine detailing security threats to the world in the age of terror and globalization...
...Jungle warfare exercises have intensified along the Amazon's northern fringes, with Brazilian troops practicing anti-insurgency tactics...
...Again, SIVAM was touted as Brazil's insurance against incursions, and the timetable for completion was speeded up...
...In the 1960s, President Juscelino Kubitschek managed the construction of Brasilia, the ultra-modern national capital built on an interior plateau of dusty scrublands...
...Those familiar with rainforest policy say Silva and others in the government are ready to chart a new course for the Amazon, and they have made speeches promising a new policy aimed at sustainability...
...The column, laced with Pinto's encyclopedic knowledge of Brazilian history, has lately been a relatively lonely dissident voice against SIVAM...
...Washington's Plan Colombia is sometimes per- the military, ceived as a sort of Trojan HorseAM as a vehicle for exerting U.S...
...As defined by the government, the Brazilian highway building beginning in the late 1960s, when Amazon covers 60 percent of Brazil's land area, Brazil's military dictatorship sought to populate the roughly equivalent to the size of half the United Amazon and develop the regional economy...
...These centers are staffed by agents of federal and state regulatory agencies and are intended to download information from SIVAM and also feed it with data to coordinate Amazon-wide environmental policing and monitoring...
...A rapid-response force will back SIVAM's monitoring...
...Whereas weather often ment seems frustrates the taking of satellite images, the SIVAM jets will be able to buzz under cloud-cover...
...Though fake, the e-mail played on fears that were not completely far-fetched...
...Over 3,000 jungle platoons will be on alert, as well as Navy gun ships and armored amphibious vehicles...
...It's a project that uses science to meet a pre-established military objective...
...Brazilian officials, seeking to calm widespread fears of the conflict's possible spillover to the Brazilian Amazon, pointed to SIVAM-then in development-as the nation's defense, along with a troop buildup...
...Standing on the roof in his hard-hat, Much of Pinto's work is informed by his thesis that Pereira sweeps his hand over surrounding plots of democracy has never become rooted in the region...
...Ever since democratization in the 1980s, the military has declined in importance throughout much of South America, but in Brazil's Amazon, the role of the military has recently grown...
...Albuquerque said the new government has prioritized SIVAM, and has backed the military's efforts to make it fully operational...
...All will be ready to deal with any unauthorized intrusions into Brazilian territory, said Albuquerque...
...SIVAM, with its intention of bringing governability to western jungles, has a similar logic...
...Environmentalists argue that unless SIVAM receives more guidance from Lula's new government, the radar's potential role as a tool for ecological management and research will be eclipsed by military concerns...
...There is at least a kernel of truth to such concerns: In 2000, a scandal erupted when it was revealed that a research pact between Bioamazonia, a statefunded biotechnology and research firm, and Novartis, a Swiss biotech multinational, included a provision that allowed the extraction of genetic material-mostly micro-organisms, fungi and bacteria-from the Amazon and its export to Europe...
...curity aspects SIVAM images will be 900 times more powerful...
...Pinto insists that with the military in firm control, the entire project will turn on bolstering jungle security...
...This is a fancy way of saying that once the Brazilian government knows in detail the make-up of the vast mosaic of savannas, highlands, rivers, lakes and forests that constitute the Amazon, it will be better able to set aside land for specific uses that are "ecologically correct...
...Albuquerque explains it, the project's security aims overlap with environmental concerns: "In the past, we've had only scattered government actions in the Amazon," he said...
...Millions were invested to get at the newly discovered wealth and the migrants followed, encouraged with government incentives...
...erful police Estimates are that 17 percent of jungle that the rainforest has been destroyed-burned, cleared or the Amazon thinned out for pasture, with the truction...
...New bases were built, some in indigenous areas...
...Pinto's stance stands in contrast to that of most Brazilian media and the Estado newspaper itself...
...The official vision of the government has remained based on the parameters of the national security doctrine," which considers low population density and lack of economic infrastructure dangerous weaknesses...
...The civilian centers have been going on-line in phases since 2002, but the sharing of data has so far not fulfilled expectations...
...They were not coordinated actions...
...Generations of military thinkers quoted Euclides Back at his small office near the gated entrance to as they wrote about a vacuum of sovereignty in the the compound, taking eager sips from a glass of jungle...
...This sophisticated surveillance tool, launched in mid-2002, represents the most significant innovation in Brazil's Amazon policy since the government's huge settlement and road building drives in the 1970s...
...Dozens of fixed radar stations, weather-tracking units, and specialized truck- and plane-mounted radars are also scattered about...
...clearing carved from the jungle...
...Other than these threats, many ordinary Brazilians are alarmed about a trend they call "the Amazon's internationalization...
...Anderson de Jesus Calvacante, 23, a student and car mechanic in Beldm, puts it this way: "Everyone knows there's a lot of mafia-type groups...
...Although Brazilian troops have exchanged gunfire with and sometimes capture Colombian guerrillas, Pinto believes the rebels' crossborder trafficking and weapons dealing is a problem for Brazil's Federal Police, not for the military...
...If it is to start working toward Col...
...The data showed there were billions of dollars in unexploited mineral, timber and hydropower resources...
...He acknowledged the situation in Colombia is dangerous, but argued SIVAM is an exaggerated response...
...It was all bush, ken critics of government policy in the Amazon...
...In 1985, President Jose Samey helped advance Brazil's transition to democratic rule, but in the Amazon he launched the Northern Trench plan that introduced military troops to far-north regions, including those bordering Colombia...
...SIVAM "represents a geopolitical vision of the Amazon," he said...
...in a process of directed colonization without precedent in the world...
...The information gathered by SIVAM can, in theory at least, be used for a variety of purposes, from monitoring illegal logging and mining to spying on insur32NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT gent groups and drug traffickers who enter the Brazilian Amazon from neighboring countries...
...In the first years of the 20th Century, Euclides da Cunha, a journalist and government envoy, traveled to Manaus and the Amazon's far west, where a border dispute brewed because Peruvian rubber-tappers were settling land that was claimed by Brazil...
...The end his boots before unrolling a laminated map over his result was decades of intense settlement schemes and desk...
...The system is already in partial operation, and its patrols already have helped identify over 30 clandestine air strips used by smugglers, according to the government...
...All the technology is linked via satellite...
...Fearnside also believes that bureaucratic inefficiency and sparse funding have meant that many of the civilian centers and some radar stations aren't fully activated and staffed, and some expensive technology may be "gathering dust" in SIVAM's many outposts...
...Following September 11 there was more widespread worry about the country's jungle frontiers bordering territory infested with so-called Colombian and Peruvian "narcoterrorists," including four groups on the U.S...
...He wrote: "the Amazon [is] a large ungovernable area for Brazil, plus all that environmental damage continues to pile up...
...His portrayal of a disorderly, faraway plant-encompasses 62,000 square meters, the size Eden that cried out for organization and exploitation of 12 soccer fields...
...His column, Carta da Amaz6nia, or "Letter from the Vol XXXVI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2003 37REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT Amazon," is published on the website operated by the Estado de Sdo Paulo newspaper, one of the country's largest...
...I think the question still is, 'how much is this going to be a military thing?' which implies, 'how much secrecy is going to be involved?' Everyone talks about openness, but experience shows when it comes to getting the data it isn't as easy as all that...
...The same see SIl month, March 2003, that troops aided by SIVAM aircraft were put a way of h in command of snuffing out Roraima forest fires, Brazilian fulfill its Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz destiny' in t Bastos ordered the military to coordinate with SIVAM to carry out a detailed mapping of border regions, in order to identify drug and weapons trafficking routes...
...It was an almost unheard of feat in Brazil: a government ribbon-cutting ceremony held on the scheduled date, in July 2002...
...But Pinto, a dapper man who lives in a villa near Bel6m's old quarter, sees SIVAM as evidence of weak civil institutions and a powerful police state in the jungle...
...The region is viewed as a faroff territory coveted by foreign powers for its genetic wealth...
...The lobby is decorated with vibrant color photos of Indians and monkeys...
...This States territory, including Alaska...
...For the first time, infrared technology will allow for night patrols...
...He regards SIVAM as the ultimate coup in the military's consolidation of its control over the Amazon...
...the city, vegetation had to be pushed back before civ- But Bel6m journalist Liicio Flivio Pinto believes ilization's plans could take root...
...intended to defend the Amazon basin from Dutch and To arrive in the rubber capital of Manaus in the French raiders...
...Ideally, with SIVAM, all information about the Amazon region-including data gathered by virtually every government office and major research institution-will be funneled into one place...
...By the end of 2003, the entire system is scheduled to be synched and working around the clock...
...Pinto's column can be read as a revisionist contemporary history of the region...
...In March 2003, Thomas Barnett, a professor of warfare analysis at the U.S...
...more deforestation...
...By his own calculations, SIVAM's price tag represents 20 years worth of government science funding for the Amazon...
...Pereira said the SIVAM site-which center of the jungle, Euclides had to sail for weeks includes a security perimeter, a water well and filtraalong the Atlantic coast and then for days up the tion station, watch tower and miniature power Amazon River...
...Drawing with a marker, Albuquerque describes the hardware that will make SIVAM revolutionary...
...State Department's list of international terror groups...
...That meant we weren't able to solve the Vol X)(XVI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2003 33 Vol XXXVI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2003 33REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT Amazon's problems, which were growing: the abuse of Indians, deforestation, smuggling, illegal bordercrossings...
...He Century colonial center...
...Scattered about are military imagination to this day...
...Will the world eventually care enough to step in...
...But the lobby is an airy atrium that allows the bright sun and green of the forest to stream inside...
...The plan is popular with the Brazilian media and a general population that is receptive to the idea of exerting more sovereignty in the Amazon, which even in Beldm is seen by ordinary Brazilians as an unruly frontier region dominated by criminal gangs...
...He promised a generous military budget to a demoralized and underpaid officer corps and apologized for his former opposition to the Northern Trench plan, a military buildup along Brazil's northern jungle borders launched in the mid-1980s...
...Last year, a widely circulated e-mail that attracted the attention of a Brazilian legislator purported to show a page from a U.S...
...Lula's first major policy move involving SIVAM came in March 2003, three months after his inauguration, when he sealed an agreement with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe that gives the Colombians access to SIVAM data in order to combat drug trafficking...
...He described the Amazon as a new land, mal- In the distance, a cluster of high-rise apartments leable to human designs, describing it as "the last marks Bel6m's modest downtown, near the 16th page of Genesis, which still has to be written...
...In this analysis, U.S...
...worst deforestation radiating out along roads connecting cities, which are home to over half of the Brazilian Amazon's 17 million people...
...We're still waiting for the data to come out," ecology professor Fearnside said...
...Similar talks are being held with Ecuador and Peru, a process that flatters Brazil's vision of itself as a South American power leading regional integration...
...That feat was meant to help the country look inland, and draw at least some population and development away from the megalopolises of Sdo Paulo and Rio de Janeiro along the Atlantic Coast...
...So far, however, Lula has emphasized SIVAM's security dimension, which was always the overriding concern for its military builders...
...Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who ended his term at the end of 2002, intended SIVAM as one of the hallmarks of his administration and personally authorized infusions of funds so the project could be launched during his presidency...
...But Philip Fearnside, a research professor in ecology at the government's Institute for Amazon Research, part of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said that the project has been slow in living up to its billing as an environmental watchdog...
...n-but so far Much of the government's past mapping depended on outdated ized SIVAM's LANDSAT satellite pictures...
...Three jets equipped with state-of-the-art imaging technology scan the jungle and feed data to SIVAM's computers...
...This is a perspective that echoes Washington's view that the Brazilian Amazon is a favored pit stop for drug traffickers...
...They have secret landing strips and planes taking off continuously for all parts of the country...
...In an April editorial, One critic se Estado praised the project, saying SIVAM's capacity to "protect the sign of a po Amazon will boost respect for state in the Brazil internationally...
...Inside, rooms for banks of computers are painted an antiseptic white and lit by fluorescent lights...
...e V t sl He is hopeful the new government will change things, but he still fears SIVAM's information, unless the project is re-focused and taken out of military hands, will be used for the wrong ends...
...The decree is still in effect, though it is under review...
...drawings representing SIVAM's many different components...
...Francisco Leite Albuquerque Neto, an athletic, middle-aged balding man with a trim moustache and a well-pressed uniform, is a fount of information on SIVAM, of which he is the vice-president...
...As a solution, they created Brazil's version of water retrieved from a refrigerator, Pereira kicks off the westward march, encouraging migration...
...About two-dozen new Brazilian-made Super-Toucan fighter jets equipped with air-to-air Piranha missiles will fly from jungle bases...
...One side of the building-some four stories high-is a sloping surface of glass, which reflects the sky and jungle...
...The handling of SIVAM may be the first big test that will determine how the new government of President Luiz Indcio Lula da Silva intends to balance security, economic and environmental concerns in the Amazon...
...Much media coverage has also won't protec celebrated SIVAM as the ultimate Brazilian spying tool that will root out outlaws...
...gargantuan undertakings meant to help the nation coalesce as a territory...
...However, all those evils will begin to disappear once this exiled society is incorporated to the rest of the country," he wrote...
...A century later, SIVAM aims to put an end to anarchy in the Amazon, but order hasn't always been the rainforest's friend...
...In the air, vironmental five radar planes will detect unauthorized flights for a 500- tion...
...The Portuguese city of emphasized the region's isolation, and its vulnerabil- houses and canals was built behind fortifications ity to foreign predation...
...This means it will need to discard outdated ideas about the need for more roads and settlements to secure sovereignty, and be nudged by Lula's government into cooperating fully with civil society and research institutions so that environmental priorities don't get short shrift...
...textbook...
...They occupy a suite in an Air Force complex next to the domestic airport...
...mile radius...
...This is a distorted vision of our frontier problems," Pinto said, sipping dark coffee in his living room while a thunderstorm rumbled outside...
...The Brazilian military views the Amazon as the country's most vulnerable Lula's govern ready to chart for the Amazo it has emphasis military and se rather than en protect region from a security standpoint, and anxiety over the Amazon's security has increased in the aftermath of September 11 and with the escalation of Colombia's civil war and its increasingly international dimension...
...This building houses a crucial node in a new $1.4 billion radar system known as SIVAM, the Portuguese acronym for System to Guard the Amazon, run by the Brazilian Air Force...
...In 2000, with its Plan Colombia, the United States began pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in military and financial support into Colombia...
...In the 1980s, when large sections of the Amazon were burning, there was an outcry among international environmentalists for intervention...
...he SIVAM project's headquarters aren't in the Amazon, but in Rio de Janeiro...
...The jun- The shadow of a logger is cast over mahogany logs-often harvested illegaly gle, Euclides wrote in one celebrated phrase, represents an "opulent disorder...
...Combining satellite images with aerial surveys, it was carried out to catalog the Amazon's wealth...
...il Vl el ' th They have immense power in the jungle...
...concerns over drug trafficking in the region are merely a cover for gaining commercial conians, inside trol over the jungle...
...It is a fortified compound for the of its extraordinary national wealth has helped shape 21st century, meant to control sky, water and earth decades of policy, through sophisticated satellite technology...
...Cardoso quickly signed a tough decree that prohibited the removal of Brazil's "genetic heritage...
...In other words, the state wasn't as present as it should be...
...Pinto is one of the most outspo"We started clearing the area in 1999...
...He bemoans spending so much on a regional radar while research languishes...
...No matter how many satellites or jets the government has, he says, Brazilians will never be able to utilize the Amazon intelligently unless they invest more in science and research...
...Euclides, as he is known, was the era's most celebrated chronicler of the country's remote areas, and his books remain among Brazil's most treasured literary classics...
...As General Meira Mattos wrote in his 1980 book, A Pan-Amazonian Geopolitics, the RADAM inventory "completely altered our concept of the region's potential...
...just bush...
...This fear is the contemporary equivalent of a long-held Brazilian concern that the country is not doing enough to disperse the seeds of modernity in its jungle frontier zone, or to tap its riches...
...Rainforest advocates were excited by Lula's appointment of Marina Silva, a former senator and Amazon activist from the jungle state of Acre, to head the Environment Ministry...
...Lula's government also has shown itself willing to position the Brazilian military, backed by SIVAM, as a sort of multi-purpose peacekeeping force-not only in Rio, where they kept the peace during Many Brazi Carnaval, but also in Brazil's "Wild West," as the Amazon is and outside sometimes called...
...A wide swath of the Amazon was set apart and labeled, "International Amazon Reserve" under the United Nations' control...
...Bel6m's SIVAM installation is only one of three such massive intelligence centers...
...As with most human endeavors in the Amazon, "I think it's about time that the Amazon became SIVAM's Bel6m installation began with a incorporated into the rest of Brazil," said Pereira...
...This was, without doubt, a pleasant surprise," he said...
...I think the price to pay for that is the continuing destruction of the Amazon...
...Marcelo Ballv/, <ballve@hotmail.com>, is an associate editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco...
...It's a great opportunity," for developing sustainable conservation techniques, said Mario Jardim, a botanist and ecologist with the prestigious Museu Goeldi, a research center in Bel6m...
...His essay "Copacabana Beach" was published in January by Penguin Putnam in the nonfiction anthology Regeneration: Telling Stories from Our Twenties...
...Lula was an enemy of the military as a trade union and pro-democracy activist in the 1980s, but sought to repair the relationship during the 2002 presidential campaign...
...But the way SIVAM'S Col...
...For some environmentalists and Amazon experts, however, the problem is that the Brazilian military now has a stranglehold on the information generated by the rainforest radar, limiting its use for purposes other than border and internal security...
...According to the government's five-year Amazon plan published in Bel6m in 1976, "diverse areas of the Amazon received thousands of families of settlers...
...This was a clear nod to the military's vision of the Amazon borders as military zones that will protect Brazil from chaos in bordering Andean nations...
...This could include, for example, irrigated farming on the fertile riverbanks, sustainable extraction of fruit and tree products in inland forests and fish farming in networks of lakes and river channels...
...In 1971, the RADAM project was implemented...
...There has been a great deal of anticipation that the administration of President Lula-as he has asked to be called-will be the "greenest" yet in Brazil's history...
...s SIVAM as a Already, the jungle isn't as pris- tine as many may imagine it...
...Against this background, Lula may be wary of intruding on the military's new turf in the Amazon...
...There are many Brazilian thinkers who have tackled the subject of the Amazon, but among the most influential is a writer who built a vision emphasizing the Amazon's frontier mystique, describing it as a land that could help renew Brazil...
...SIVAM planners also envision a push toward "ecological zoning," according to Albuquerque...
...Even near SIVAM "will help that happen...
...In any case, Lula comes into office after a concerted six-year military buildup in the Amazon...
...This vast area is frontier ethos has managed to hold its grip on the shaded green on Pereira's map...
...SIPAM is centered on civilian research centers, one in each Amazonian state, which process SIVAM data for environmental and scientific uses and then distribute it to local researchers...
...Brazilian national security officials deployed over 20,000 extra troops to the region as Colombia's conflict heated up in the late 1990s...
...Lula has promised to strengthen SIVAM's civilian component, known as SIPAM, or System to Protect the Amazon...
...biotechnology companies are perceived as modern-day pirates, manifest robbing Brazil of its genetic herie Amazon...
...hege- mony in the region...
...itage...
...The building's futuristic design seems out of place amid neighborhoods of wood and brick homes with tin roofs, and rutted alleyways where cattle pace...
...Albuquerque's description of a sustainable, high-tech jungle policed by jets, data stations and radars, the military will need to avoid repeating the mistakes of RADAM...
...The development of the Amazon is simply part of our national process, just as your governments populated the American West in the 19th Century...
...In many ways, this state of affairs is the legacy of past technological innovations and how they enabled military planners to accelerate settlement in the region...
...In early March 2003, when forest fires flared in the northern state of Roraima, SIVAM didn't detect the blazes, though the military and some aircraft were later deployed with SIVAM support to combat the flames...
...In a conference room with views of Rio's postcard-famous Guanabara Bay, Air Force Col...
Vol. 36 • May 2003 • No. 6
