ARMY LIFE TAKES TURN IN SPOTLIGHT

TV Show Gives Colombia's Military A Lift

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 a real army training base.

"It's lots of dirty fun," said co-host Andrea Serna, whose own tight cammy
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."

The public image of the 146,000-member armed forces has in fact 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-narcotics 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 like 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 television 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 only Nov. 4, Comandos has already bumped the RCN network from
fourth to second place in the Saturday 4:30 p.m. time slot and it's
receiving 3,000 applications from would-be competitors.

AT TRAINING BASE

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 co-host 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 any weapons at all 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 them 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.

MIDDLE CLASS

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 Army
Maj. Hector Gomez, stationed in the northern city of Barrancabermeja.

In the 1960s and '70s, with relatively 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 the FARC and 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. Virtually every statement
by the armed forces or its officers describe the military as the country's
"legitimate authority" -- as though that was in doubt -- and dismisses the
guerrillas as "narco-terrorists."

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."