US TRAINS COLOMBIAN MILITARY TO RESIST REBELS

TUMACO, Colombia -- Chided by his Green Beret instructor, a Colombian
corporal returns to the firing range after putting a Band-Aid on a
thumb worn raw by clicking the safety of his M-16 rifle on and off.

"Are we OK ?" Staff Sgt. Juan Estay asks with mock
concern.

Estay, a 34-year old from Miami, is one of eight U.S. Army Special
Forces soldiers running a six-week training course in this Pacific
jungle port. Such exercises are key instruments of U.S. policy to
bolster Colombia's armed forces in their uphill struggle against
highly effective, well-disciplined rebels.

The U.S. trainers are highly esteemed by their 30 Colombian pupils
- --six marine officers and 24 senior enlisted marines. After a
run-and-shoot competition that culminates marksmanship practice, the
Colombian contingent's chief, Capt. Eduardo Chavez, shows his
appreciation by hugging Master Sgt. Mike Wood, 34, of St. Louis.

Such training is central to a gradually intensifying U.S. military
involvement in Colombia encouraged by the government of President
Andres Pastrana, who took office in August.

During a recent visit to Colombia, U.S. Defense Secretary William
Cohen signed an accord pledging to increase intelligence support and
provide more training.

Officially, Washington classifies the military instructor missions as
counternarcotics training, one ingredient in a decade-old U.S. effort
to combat drug trafficking in Colombia.

In practice, the Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces group at
Fort Bragg, N.C., are teaching skills the Colombian military needs to
fight its main foe: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The
rebel movement, the hemisphere's oldest and largest leftist
insurgency, has for the past three years been pummeling an army
composed largely of ill-prepared conscripts.

The six-week course in Tumaco focuses on basic light-infantry skills,
including helicopter-borne operations, riverine infiltration,
explosives use and ambush techniques. U.S. trainers provided 60,000
rounds of ammunition, three Zodiac inflatable boats and, for one week,
two Blackhawk helicopters.

"It's counterguerrilla training," said Col. Juan Diego Rendon, deputy
commander of the Colombian army's 12th Brigade, whose
counterinsurgency battalion now has 150 soldiers being trained by a
second team of Green Berets in the rebel-dominated southern state of
Caqueta.

Nowadays in Colombia, it's hard to fight narcotics without taking on
the rebels, who finance themselves largely by taxing the drug trade
and protecting cocaine laboratories and airstrips.

The Pentagon put on a dozen Special Forces training courses in
Colombia this year and officials say 14 are scheduled for 1999,
roughly half the overall U.S. "counterdrug" training missions in the
country.

Over the past two years, U.S. assistance to the Colombian military has
included hundreds of M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns, flak jackets,
ammunition, night-vision goggles and trucks.

The United States is also working on establishing a high-tech joint
intelligence center in southern Colombia, where U.S. specialists would
provide the Colombian military almost immediately with information
from satellites and spy planes, officials say.

In addition, Washington has offered to help train and equip an
anti-narcotics battalion, expected to be formed by mid-1999 and
composed of 1,000 soldiers and police officers. Currently, no
Colombian military unit is devoted exclusively, or even primarily, to
drug enforcement.

"Our assistance is provided to combat narcotics production and
trafficking and may be used to counter all those who are actively
involved in the drug trade," State Department spokesman James Rubin
said Tuesday.

The American involvement remains a far cry from its
multibillion-dollar help for Central American nations fighting
insurgencies during the 1980s, and it operates within strict limits.

"We have neither the money nor the appetite to do any great ramp-up,"
said Brian Sheridan, a U.S. Defense Department official involved in
special operations and low-intensity conflict.

The number of American military personnel in Colombia never exceeds
200, U.S. officials say, and American soldiers are not permitted to
accompany Colombian troops into combat.

The Colombian government knows, to be successful in peace talks with
the rebels, that it needs a few battlefield victories. Increased U.S.
military aid could be a decisive factor.

"We are hoping for more help. We need it. Definitely, we do need it,"
Defense Minister Rodrigo Lloreda said in an interview.

A bigger U.S. role faces considerable obstacles, however.

Colombia's military has a poor human rights record, and two U.S. laws
sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and enacted since 1996 allow
U.S. military aid and training only for Colombian units whose human
rights records are clean. So far, only three units of the army, the
service most engaged in fighting rebels, have cleared the screening
process.

Senior army officers have been accused of promoting right-wing
paramilitary groups who kill civilians suspected of supporting the
guerrillas. The military's main intelligence brigade, dissolved in
May, was implicated in a series of death-squad killings, and its
former commander, now a fugitive, is wanted for allegedly organizing
the 1995 assassination of Colombia's main opposition leader.

Largely because of human rights concerns, Colombia's military annually
receives less than one-tenth of the more than $100 million in
anti-narcotics assistance provided by Washington. The bulk goes to
Colombia's police, which the U.S. Congress just voted to give an
additional $200 million over the next three years.

The constraints are not discouraging Marine Gen. Charles Wilhelm,
chief of the U.S. Southern Command responsible for Latin America, who
has visited what he calls the hemisphere's "most threatened country"
just about every other month this year.

"Frustration is not a course of action for the military," the veteran
of two Vietnam tours said of the restrictions in an interview, adding
that he believes the Colombian military deserves credit for making
"very significant strides on human rights."

At a U.S. congressional hearing last March, Wilhelm listed the
deficiencies of Colombia's military as primarily in "mobility, direct
attack capabilities, night operations, communications systems,
intelligence systems, the ability to operate in rivers and coastal
regions and the ability to sustain their forces once committed."

With the guerrillas exploiting those weaknesses in one devastating
attack after another, the temptations for U.S. personnel to get more
involved become harder to resist.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry