Brazil fears Colombian rebels recruiting Indians

21 May 2003 16:53:30 GMT BRASILIA, Brazil, May 21 (Reuters) - Brazil strongly suspects that Marxist guerrillas from Colombia are crossing its jungle border and forcing young Indian villagers to join their ranks, a police investigator said on Wednesday.

"We have accounts of Indians being recruited," federal police agent Geraldo de Castro Neto told Reuters. "The guerrillas paint a picture of a better life. There is also the possibility of forced work, but we still have nothing concrete."

Brazilian security has long suspected the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or cocaine smugglers of using local Indians to carry drugs through the jungles to Brazil.

But since Brazil opened a police outpost in April deep in the northwest Amazon near the border, authorities have been alarmed to find entire Indian communities populated by only young children and adults, with no adolescents.

Investigators fear the young people were taken away by the rebel group known by the Spanish initials FARC, which "taxes" the cocaine trade to fund its four-decade-old war in Colombia.

"There is nothing stopping the Indians being used in the drug trade as well," Castro Neto said by telephone. "Everything is under investigation."

The remote Amazon area known in Brazil as the "dog's head," straddling thick jungle between Colombia and Venezuela, is notorious for drug smuggling.

FARC recruiting of Brazilian Indians would be more evidence that Colombia's war is spilling over into its giant neighbor, which is already a major market for Colombian cocaine.

Castro Neto said the FARC started forced recruitment of Brazilian Indians two or three years ago.

Colombia's armed forces have long warned that the FARC has crossed into the country's neighbors, including Brazil, and the Bogota government regularly accuses the rebels of forced recruitment of Colombians.