Posted on 10/30/2003 4:27:59 PM PST by Libloather
Brazil tightens screws on drug flights
By Raymond Colitt in Manaus
Last Updated: October 30 2003 21:18
Brazil plans to step up the battle against drug flights crossing its airspace from Colombia en route to customers in North America, Europe and at home.
The air force and federal police will in coming weeks be tracking incoming drug flights to their destination using aircraft and helicopters from the Tabatinga air base on the Colombian border.
A ground crew will then confiscate the cargo and capture the pilot, a Brazilian police official said.
"We hope to cut off one of the main drug export routes from Colombia," Mauro Sposito, who heads the operation at the federal police, told the FT.
With drug-related crimes and violence in its own cities rising every year, Brazil is gradually tightening the screws on trafficking, with seizures of cocaine rising from about seven to nine tonnes annually.
"There is a growing awareness of the connection between drugs and organised crime [in Brazil]," says Giovanni Quaglia, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Braslia.
However, the new strategy comes as the left-leaning government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appears inclined not to implement a 1998 law allowing suspect aircraft on illegal flights to be shot down.
"I don't see the law being enacted," said a top official involved in the anti-narcotics operations. "It doesn't sit well with democracy and human rights."
Most countries in the region abandoned the US-sponsored policy of shooting down aircraft suspected of ferrying drugs after one carrying US missionaries was accidentally shot down over Peru in 2001.
According to some estimates the "Atlantic route" leading from south-eastern Colombia across northern Brazil and Venezuela or Guyana accounts for roughly 45 per cent of the cocaine leaving Colombia.
Aerial tracking of suspect aircraft has only recently become possible through information supplied by the newly inaugurated Amazon protection system (Sipam), a radar and satellite-driven surveillance system that shows routes of drug flights and their clandestine landing strips in the jungle.
A few aircraft have the range to cross Brazilian air space without landing. Many, however, use airstrips near the border with Guyana when drugs are destined for re-export, or in northern Mato Grosso state when destined for the domestic market.
Over the past two years the federal police and the air force have bombed dozens of such airstrips.
Now, aided by the new surveillance system, they can track drug flights and hope to deter traffickers with costly drug seizures.
"I think this is a better use of intelligence than shooting down planes," says Mr Quaglia. "Yet it needs to be accompanied by increased investment in law enforcement."
Increased aerial surveillance may lead to a rise in drug transporation by numerous land and river routes that are impossible to control on the tight budget of Brazil's defence and security forces.
I suppose that would help keep the wings from falling off...
And they are just now realizing this at the United Nations?
To paraphrase, "What a buncha maroons."
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