COLUMN ONE : Brazil Gets Set to Wire Rain Forest : The vast Amazon region teems not only with nature but with drug smuggling, looting and other crimes. The government hopes electronic surveillance will protect it. Critics see a boondoggle in the making.

Flying over the Amazon is like skimming an ocean of green that goes on for hours, blurred by rising mist, then bright in the tropical sun. From horizon to horizon, it’s green and more green. In the rain forest below live millions of species, the Earth’s greatest treasure of biological diversity, a mysterious wilderness that Brazil has yet to master or even understand in all its immensity and complexity.

But in recent decades, the green has begun to wilt. Millions of people have pushed into the region, greatly worsening problems such as deforestation, erosion, pollution, poverty and crime.

Now, to learn more about the Amazon, to watch over and protect it, Brazilian authorities and a U.S. company are about to launch a pioneering project that would put the vast, vulnerable region under electronic surveillance. With a planned cost of $1.4 billion, this push would wire one of the Earth’s most undeveloped regions with some of the world’s most advanced technology.

The project epitomizes the stark contrasts typical in Brazil, a country of great industrial wealth and grinding poverty, skyscrapers and thatch huts, freeways and jungle trails.

The system will superimpose state-of-the-art technology over 2 million square miles of wild frontier, where settlers and prospectors still clash with naked Indians in the primeval forest. Digital data will zip from satellites, radar and other high-tech sensors to computerized processing centers and hundreds of “user-nodes” scattered through the hinterlands.

There is no comparable project in the world. Its scope seems almost as staggering as the Amazon’s emerald expanses. The software to integrate the system’s multiple components still has not been written. But planners predict it will be up and running by the year 2000. The system, they say, will give Brazil and the world a formidable, accurate, effective tool, a revolutionary means of observation and communication in a region where so much information is so sorely needed.

Now largely unmonitored and not policed, the Amazon teems with drug smuggling, illegal mining and logging, and slash-and-burn farming. Officials say there is no effective way to combat such activities and control development without electronic surveillance.

“We cannot invest large sums or even protect the environment without knowing what’s going on in the region, so we need it badly,” said Ronaldo Sardenberg, Brazil’s secretary of strategic affairs.

Will it work? “If it doesn’t work, it’s a tragedy. We have staked our necks on this,” he said. “We think it will work and, more than think, we will act toward making it work.”

But, like skeptics who wondered whether the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative--nicknamed the “Star Wars” defense--would ever fulfill its promise, some Brazilians have their doubts.

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“I want to see efficient answers to the problems of the Amazon and not fantasies from [an Arnold] Schwarzenegger movie,” retired army Gen. Thaumaturgo Sotero Vaz grumbled to a Brazilian newspaper. Still, the general offered no other solutions, and the government approved the project.

The contractor entrusted to put Brazil’s system together is the U.S. firm Raytheon Co. After winning a controversial bidding contest against France’s Thomson-CSF, Raytheon plans to begin work later this year, pending final approval by the Brazilian Senate of the foreign financing.

“The breadth of the program is what is totally unique,” said Raytheon Vice President James Carter, the company officer in charge. “The technologies are there, and it’s a question now of applying them to do a job that is very, very difficult to do. . . . How do you monitor 5 million square kilometers of the Amazon? You certainly don’t do it walking around on the ground.”

In separate interviews, Carter and Sardenberg described the complex array of functions expected of the new system. It will, for example, track drug-smuggling flights from neighboring Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the main sources of refined and raw cocaine. It will detect deforestation, wildcat mining and other threats to the Amazon environment.

The system will be used to pinpoint the boundaries and monitor the use of Indian reservations, parks and other preserves. It will help map soil, terrain, minerals and vegetation to assist the ecological and economic zoning of the Amazon. It will keep tabs on migration and settlement in a region already occupied by 17 million people.

Raytheon says the system will also provide data for weather forecasts and climate studies, aid military command and control, and support air traffic control.

Indeed, the system was first conceived as an air traffic control project for the Amazon, which covers about half of Brazil’s land mass but now has almost no radar coverage for air navigation.

“We realized that the problem in that region was much more comprehensive, a much larger problem than we had thought, not only in terms of air traffic control but also in terms of data acquisition about the region,” Sardenberg said.

Maps, environmental data, photo images and other information about the Amazon are often sketchy, inaccurate and outdated. Manually processing and interpreting satellite images, for example, can now take 45 days because the images are not digitized and available swiftly via computer, Sardenberg said.

“Sometimes when we learn what is going on, it is not going on anymore,” he said. “So we thought we had to do something to make a dramatic updating of our possibilities.”

The project has been dubbed the System for the Vigilance of the Amazon, or SIVAM. It will use satellites already in orbit but will upgrade receiving equipment. There will be 14 permanent and six transportable radar units. Five Brazilian-made turbo-prop planes also will be equipped with radar for tracking targets. Three other such craft, used mainly for mapping, will carry imaging radar, along with optical and infrared sensors.

Several hundred environmental data collection platforms will monitor air and water pollution. A weather radar system and automated weather stations on the ground and in the air will provide data for forecasting and climate studies.

Information will be passed on to government agencies such as the Agricultural and the Environment and the Amazon Region ministries, the federal police, the military, the National Indian Foundation, and state and local governments. These entities also will use the system’s telecommunications network to communicate by computer among themselves.

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For example, a government agent working with Indians in the heart of the rain forest could receive a satellite picture of his area in real time, then consult by computer with a distant federal police officer or environmental agent about what the picture showed.

The same satellite image might be accessible on the Internet, Sardenberg said. He predicted that by making useful information available, the system will create demand for protective action in the Amazon.

Raytheon’s Carter said the telecommunications network will be a “whole mix. . . . If you’re close to a phone line, you connect into that, tie it back in. If you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it may be a satellite link because that’s the only way to get the information back.”

The official Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources has already begun wiring its own computer network. The institute is using $10 million in World Bank funds to install and connect computers in 822 offices and outposts, including 200 in the Amazon.

Raul Jungmann, the agency’s president, said the network will process and transmit information for environmental protection, including digital satellite images, starting in mid-1996. Eventually, the institute and SIVAM systems will merge, Jungmann said, noting that SIVAM “creates new systems and adds on existing systems, so there is a leap in quality.”

Not everyone agrees. Arlindo Chinaglia, a member of the lower house of Congress from the leftist Workers’ Party, calls the proposed system “a centralizing, megalomaniac project that will attempt to do work that other entities are already doing. When [it] is installed, if it is ever installed, it will be obsolete technology.”

Earlier this year, criticism of the project centered on anonymous allegations in the media that Thomson-CSF and Raytheon paid bribes in their campaigns for the contract. Both companies deny any illicit payments, and congressional investigation turned up no evidence against either.

Critics also charged that U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown and even President Clinton pressured Brazil to give Raytheon the contract. But U.S. and Brazilian officials say Brazil signed a five-year contract with Raytheon in late May because the U.S. company offered the best technology at the lowest price with the most favorable financing. The U.S. government Export-Import Bank agreed to lend 85% of the funds, while Raytheon and its subcontractors will finance most of the rest.

The proposed network is a response to Brazilian concerns about national security in the Amazon as well as to international pressure for environmental protection of the region. For much of this century, Brazilian nationalists and military strategists have feared foreign intervention in the Amazon. They have worried that the region’s untapped, underprotected natural resources could be a tempting prize for neighboring countries, multinational corporations and even the United States.

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In the 1970s and early 1980s, the military government then in power built roads through the forest and gave incentives for ranchers, settlers and miners to occupy Amazon lands. That push resulted in extensive damage to the fragile ecology. Since the late 1980s, civilian administrations have been under strong pressure from environmentalists in Brazil and abroad to stop the destruction.

Clovis Bragagao, a professor at Rio de Janeiro’s Candido Mendes University, argues in a new book that the concept of “ecological security” is becoming as important as national security in regions such as the Amazon.

As population growth and industrial development take an increasing toll on the Earth’s environment, Bragagao contends, ecological preservation will become more important to everyone’s security. He points out that the Amazon region, shared by six countries, is the source of 20% of the world’s fresh water and home to half of the Earth’s species.

In an interview, Bragagao said the proposed computer system is an important step toward ecological security, “an exceptional instrument” for monitoring the environmental impact of development.

“It’s like Brazil is entering the 21st Century,” he said.

The project opens the door for Brazil to acquire valuable technology, but Bragagao cautioned that the technology must be adapted to this system.

“That adaptation is a problem to be resolved,” he said. “It is a serious problem.”

In the mid-1970s, Brazil began a project with what was then West Germany aimed at transferring German technology to build eight nuclear power plants in Brazil. That project failed because of political, bureaucratic and technical problems.

“Brazil spent more than $20 billion and still doesn’t have a single plant,” Bragagao said. “A question to be asked is whether the [computer] contract won’t do the same thing that the nuclear agreement did.”

Raytheon’s Carter predicted that not only will this project be successful but similar surveillance efforts in other countries will become a significant business area for his company.

“Over the next five, 10, 15 years, you’ll see other countries installing similar kinds of capabilities,” he said. “They may have slightly different capabilities--if you’ve got a country that has a lot of water, you may want to do more vessel monitoring, or whatever.

“But I think fundamentally you’ll see that kind of what we call wide area surveillance being implemented in a number of countries. But Brazil is really the first.”

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Long was recently on assignment in Brazil.