COLOMBIAN MILITARY SPONSORS GAME SHOW

In A Public-Relations Campaign, Contestants Undergo Commando-Style Training

BOGOTA, Colombia - Contestants on the television game show Comandos wear
camouflage, combat boots and helmets as they crawl through mud, swing on
ropes, and run obstacle courses at an army training base.

"It's lots of dirty fun," said cohost Andrea Serna, whose own tight
T-shirts and pants are definitely not army-issue. "Many people have a
fantasy of being in the army - for three days, not three years."

But Comandos is more than a game show. Sponsored by a Colombian armed
forces that admit to feeling isolated as they fight leftist guerrillas and
drug traffickers, the program is also a bit of soft-core propaganda aimed
at connecting the military with civilian society.

Bashed by human rights groups, chronically underfinanced, sidelined from
peace talks with rebels, and shunned by the sons of the elite, the armed
forces are pushing the message that they are a legitimate part of Colombian
society.

"Many times we feel very alone," said Lt. Col. Carlos Ospina, deputy chief
of the department that sponsors the show.

"An army like ours, engaged in a frontal war, must find some way of
reaching the civilian community."

An Improved Image

The public image of the 146,000-member armed forces has improved in recent
years, with a drop in human rights complaints, scattered battlefield
victories, its increasing professionalism, and the arrival of $1.3 billion
in U.S. aid, mostly for a military-run counter-drug offensive.

Recent Gallup polls have shown the security forces - the military and the
120,000-member National Police - are the second-most respected institution
in the nation behind the Catholic Church. But even so, wealthy families
regularly bribe military draft officials to spare their sons the 18 months
of mandatory service - though by law high school graduates cannot be
assigned to combat units.

And the military's standing remains far behind that of the police, which
rid itself of 11,000 corrupt or ineffective agents in the mid-1990s and now
receives eight applications for every job opening.

That's where TV shows such as Comandos come in: Trying to break through the
isolation, the Joint High Command's Department of Media and Psychological
Operations now sponsors several programs to reach civilians, from a
children's circus to four TV shows.

The U.S. aid package includes a $1 million contract with a U.S. firm, yet
to be officially selected, that will advise the Colombian armed forces on
their public relations and psychological operations.

Launched on Nov. 4, Comandos has already bumped the RCN network from fourth
to second place in the Saturday 4:30 p.m. time slot.

Winners Get Vacations

Teams compete in obstacle courses at the Tolemaida National Training
Center, the army's main training base 50 miles southwest of Bogota. Winners
get one-week vacations in the colonial-era Caribbean port of Cartagena,
show cohost Ivan Lalinde said, "and a lot of joshing that they are so good
that they will be taken into the real army."

Lalinde said the program never shows weapons and once vetoed a proposal for
a contest with paintball guns as "too militaristic."

"There's a disconnect between the military and civilians," said Richard
Millett, a historian of Latin American militaries who is with the U.S.
Marine Corps University in Virginia. "For the army this is an all-out war
of survival. Civilians just want the war to end."

Unlike other armed forces in Latin America, Colombia's has traditionally
kept out of politics, with the exception of Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla's
military rule from 1953 to 1957. President Andres Pastrana has even kept
the military from any direct role in his peace contacts with the leftist
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC - unlike the
negotiations that ended Central America's civil wars in the 1990s, where
military officers sat at the bargaining table.

Most of the Colombian military's officers come from middle-class families
and small cities, and their offspring attend special schools and tend to
marry within the caste. Most of its soldiers come from poor rural families,
much like the rebels they fight.

"My neighbors won't even say hello on the streets, if I am in uniform,
because they don't want to be seen as friends of the military," said Maj.
Hector Gomez, stationed in the northern city of Barrancabermeja.

In the 1960s and '70s, with small guerrilla groups operating in far-off
corners of the country, which is seven times the size of Florida, the
military was among the smallest and worst funded in Latin America.

But then came the '80s, when FARC and the National Liberation Army grew fat
on a steady diet of "taxes" on the cocaine trade and kidnappings, and
right-wing paramilitary units emerged to counter the guerrillas.

Suddenly, the military found itself outgunned by the rebels, shunned by
civilians it could not protect, and accused by government prosecutors and
human rights activists of allowing the paramilitary squads to kill at will.

"They feel alone, even persecuted," former Foreign Minister Rodrigo Pardo said.

While allegations of human rights abuses continue, the pressures have
sometimes made the military as an institution appear almost timid and
certainly insecure of its role in the conflict.

The military is pleased by the success of Comandos, but even one of the
hosts expresses a bit of surprise at its popularity.

"To be honest, it's a bit strange because I've never heard any of the
contestants even mention the real war," Lalinde said. "Maybe it's because
people see the real war on the television news every night."