Brazilian Border Backwater Gears Up in Fear of Drug War Spillover

TABATINGA, Brazil —  The battered minibus lurches over the last speed bump and hurtles down the Avenue of Friendship, past a perpetually closed blue-and-white border post, around a curve and out of Brazil.

Suddenly the sunbaked concrete gives way to shady streets lined with palmettos and flamboyants. Shop signs are in Spanish instead of Portuguese, a new set of mayoral candidates stare from billboards, and the bars tout Aguila beer instead of Antarctica.

Welcome to Leticia, Colombia. No passport, no visa, no border check. No questions.

Brazilians, Peruvians and Colombians, pesos and reals, samba and salsa have always mingled easily in this remote corner of Brazil’s western Amazon, some 2,500 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.

But now Brazil is worried about its neighbor. There is fear that Colombia’s $7.5-billion plan to eradicate drugs may lead cocaine traffickers, guerrillas and refugees to seek safety over the border. As Brazilians prepare for a possible invasion, this sleepy Amazon town suddenly finds itself at the front lines.

In September the government began Operation Cobra, a three-year program of heightened vigilance along Brazil’s 1,020-mile jungle border with Colombia. The federal police increased its border force from 20 agents to 180 and set up seven bases, including one on each of the four rivers that flow from Colombia into Brazil.

“The whole world was talking about the Colombia Plan,” says Mauro Sposito, the federal police chief in charge of the operation. “We had to do something.”

With 18 boats, two planes and a helicopter, police are equipped to find and turn back any intruders, Sposito says. Miles of marshy jungle form a natural land barrier, and police do their best to monitor movement by water or air.

From the sky they hunt for clandestine airstrips and occasionally land to blow holes in them with dynamite. Congress is debating how to implement a “shootdown law” that would allow Brazil to fire on planes that illegally enter its airspace.

Things aren’t expected to heat up until the United States delivers a promised $1.3 billion in aid and equipment for Colombia. But the concern was evident in late October at a hemisphere-wide meeting of defense ministers in the Brazilian city of Manaus, 700 miles east of Tabatinga.

Venezuela and Ecuador complained loudly about a possible “spillover” from the crackdown. Brazil offered to help with surveillance data from its $1.4-billion Amazon radar system--when it’s finished--and tighter controls on money laundering and chemicals used to make cocaine.

Still, most countries feel it’s not their fight and don’t want to get dragged in. Sposito notes the Colombian guerrillas are fighting far from Brazil, near Ecuador, and the drug kingpins are in the cities, not the jungle. Brazilian national security is not at risk, he says.

“We took the lead so we wouldn’t be surprised, but we’re really not too worried,” he says. “The guerrillas and the traffickers don’t want to come here, and if Colombians come as citizens, what’s the problem?”

One big problem could be refugees, says Leticia’s mayor, John Alex Benjumea Moreno.

“We are very worried about this,” he says. “If there are large movements of refugees here it will cause a great social problem, and we have no money to deal with it.”

The porous border also would make that a problem for Tabatinga, its Brazilian neighbor. The two cities are bound by economic ties and by the Amazon jungle stretching away on all sides.

They also share a shadowy past. Older residents recall the boom years of the 1980s, when outsiders arrived with suitcases full of cash and Leticia, a city of 30,000, boasted 15 bordellos. Money was easy, and violence was routine.

“It was the bonanza of drug trafficking,” concedes Benjumea, a former radio journalist. “But we managed to do away with it. Today it is almost extinct here.”

Colombian authorities in Leticia control trafficking with help from a U.S. military-operated radar station nearby. The military uses the data to chase illegal aircraft and has cut down the air movement of drugs.

The decline of the drug trade sent the area’s economy into a tailspin, but it slowly recovered by investing in other activities such as fishing, electronics and import-export businesses, Benjumea says. Today Leticia is a sharp contrast to shabby Tabatinga.

“We are worried about Tabatinga. There still is much violence and drugs there,” Benjumea says. “Operation Cobra will be good for us. It will bring us security.”

The U.S. military also applauds.

“It’s good to see that Brazil is concerned,” says Steve Lucas, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami. “With narco trafficking, it’s the balloon effect-- you squeeze them one place, and they bulge out another.”

At a narrows in the Amazon River, two hours by speedboat from Tabatinga, a federal police barge sits at anchor near a Tikuna Indian village. This is Base Anzol, or Fishhook Base in Portuguese, one of the choke points of Operation Cobra.

On board, an attack already is underway.

“Fresh blood,” says agent Mario Mendes, watching in amusement as a visitor swats at a horde of no-see-ums. “Forget the repellent. It just excites them.”

The other agents on deck laugh, and Chico, the base’s pet monkey, peers up in curiosity. At this backwater outpost, bugs and boredom are always the most insidious foes.

Now Anzol is getting ready for new enemies.

“We’re already on alert, and the other bases also will be stepping up operations,” says Mendes, who was pulled off his assignment in the southeastern coastal city of Macae for a tour of duty at Anzol. “You can imagine how thrilled my wife was,” he adds.

Equipped with radar, radios and a 150-horsepower motor launch that can outrun almost anything on the river, police check every vessel that goes by, around the clock, looking for contraband, particularly drugs.

“We’ve found cocaine inside fish, fruits, statues of saints, soap, fuel drums, coils of rope, shampoo, electronic appliances, tubes soldered to the bottom of the boat,” Mendes says, ticking the list off on his fingers. “These guys are very creative.”

Still, some doubt Colombia’s drug crackdown or Operation Cobra will change much. Colombians and Brazilians are bonded here, and things will go on much as before, people say.

“You can get anything you want here. Cocaine, anything,” says Waldecy Bitencourt, a waiter at the Te Contei? Bar and Restaurant in Tabatinga. “You’d have to throw a net over the whole area to stop it, but there’s just too much money coming in and out to do that.”