The New York Times put it this way in 1990: Brazilian physicists have concluded that the military was one or two years away from having the materials - twenty to thirty-five pounds of weapons-grade enriched uranium - to make a Hiroshima-type bomb. The testing was happening at a remote complex in the southern Para called Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso. A week after that story broke, Brazil's president Fernando Collor de Mello told the United Nations General Assembly that Brazil today rejects the idea of any test that implies nuclear explosions, even for peaceful ends. The program that he shut down had been authorized fifteen years earlier by military dictator Ernesto Geisel. It had run through the Amazon ground, under cover of a test range that remains one of the most secretive installations in South America.
Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso - CPBV for short - occupies 21,588 square kilometers of southern Para. The perimeter is 653 kilometers. It overlaps four municipalities: Altamira, Itaituba, Jacareacanga, and Novo Progresso. That makes it roughly the size of the Brazilian state of Sergipe, or roughly the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Inside it, the Brazilian Armed Forces conduct the testing and training activities that an integrated military needs space for - bomb drops, weapons evaluation, electronic warfare exercises, tactical training in jungle conditions. The complex includes Cachimbo Airport, the range's lifeline for transport and emergency access. Brigadier Haroldo Coimbra Velloso, who built the infrastructure and for whom the complex is named, served Brazil's Air Force from before the facility existed until his death in 1969. He did not live to see the expansion.
The airfield opened January 20, 1954, to solve a specific logistical problem. Brazil's economy and population were concentrated in the southeast, around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, but its territory extended deep into the Amazon. Aircraft flying between those two worlds had to follow the long coastal route, because the rainforest offered no safe emergency fields. An airstrip in the middle of the forest meant shorter, straighter flights - and the ability to project military presence into the Amazon at a time when Brazil was just beginning to think of its interior as something other than an empty frontier. The airfield predates the rest of the complex by decades. The weapons range grew around it in the 1970s when the generals who ran Brazil looked at the map and saw that the remote Amazon could hide activities that would be hard to conceal anywhere else.
Ernesto Geisel, a retired general who served as Brazil's president from 1974 to 1979, authorized what came to be called the parallel nuclear program in 1975. The public Brazilian nuclear program cooperated with West Germany and operated under international safeguards. The parallel program did not. It ran outside of civilian oversight, outside of congressional review, and its existence was not officially acknowledged for fifteen years. CPBV was the testing site. Shaft-like structures were excavated in the ground there - nominally for conventional explosive research, but with specifications that matched the requirements for underground nuclear weapons tests. Reports circulated, never confirmed, that Iraq had provided some technical assistance in the late 1980s. Whether that happened, and to what extent, is the kind of question that classified archives answer only slowly.
In 1990, Fernando Collor de Mello, a newly elected civilian president, gave a symbolic speech at CPBV. Standing at the edge of one of the shafts that had been excavated for the program, he poured lime into it to seal it. Within days, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly and formally renounced any Brazilian intent to build nuclear weapons, even for peaceful purposes. Brazil went on to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1998, nearly three decades after the treaty opened for signature. The physicists who had been working on weapons-grade uranium enrichment were redirected, some to civilian energy research, some out of the field entirely. The shafts at CPBV were sealed. The complex kept running for the range work it had been doing before the parallel program. The bomb that might have been assembled, according to the New York Times's sources, within one or two years, was not.
The next time CPBV made international news was September 29, 2006. A new executive Embraer Legacy 600, being ferried by American pilots, collided in level flight with Gol Transportes Aereos Flight 1907 - a Boeing 737-800 carrying 154 people - over the territory of the complex. The Legacy's winglet sliced off about half of the 737's left wing. The Boeing broke apart in the air and came down in the jungle inside the range, killing everyone on board. The Legacy, severely damaged, managed to land at Cachimbo Airport, saved by the fact that the military range below it contained an airstrip. All seven occupants of the Legacy walked away uninjured. The 154 people on the 737 did not. The investigation that followed reshaped air traffic control standards across Brazil and accelerated the rollout of ADS-B and TCAS-II systems over the Amazon interior - changes that cost lives to accomplish.
Coordinates 9.33 S, 54.97 W. The CPBV complex covers 21,588 square kilometers - larger than many countries. Cachimbo Airport ICAO SBCC sits within the complex. This is active military airspace with testing operations - check NOTAMs and avoid unless authorized. Recommended overflight altitude: well above restricted zones as published. From FL350 the complex reads as a broadly continuous canopy with a straight runway scar in the center. Nearest civilian airports: Itaituba (SBIH), Altamira (SBHT), Novo Progresso (SWNK). BR-163 runs along the eastern edge of the complex.