SPECIAL FORCES BEGIN DANGEROUS TRAINING TO PROTECT COLOMBIAN PIPELINE

ARAUCA, Colombia - American Army Special Forces teams moved last week into
what a senior U.S. intelligence official calls "the most dangerous place in
Colombia," to begin training Colombian soldiers to protect an often-bombed
500-mile oil pipeline that runs along a porous border with neighboring
Venezuela.

At a time when American soldiers are policing Afghanistan and the Balkans,
fighting a global battle against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, keeping watch
on North Korea and preparing for possible military action in Iraq, the
escalating U.S. military involvement in Colombia's drug war has gone
largely unnoticed.

The arrival of the Green Berets signaled a more aggressive U.S. effort to
help Colombian forces fight the guerrillas of the leftist National
Liberation Army, or ELN, and newcomers to this region from the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Until now, American
efforts have been aimed almost exclusively at curtailing cocaine and heroin
production.

The vulnerable oil pipeline is crucial to the Colombian government, which
has seen millions of gallons of oil spill into the region's soil, rivers
and streams and lost tens of millions in oil revenues.

The special forces team - A Company 3rd Battalion 7th Special Forces Group
- - that's doing the training is from Fort Bragg, N.C., and is commanded by
Maj. Bill White.

White will base 40 Special Forces troops on a small military base in the
nearby town of Saravena and 30 others at a larger military post in Arauca.
Two more will be stationed at the sprawling facilities at Cano Limon, where
Occidental Petroleum and Colombia's Ecopetrol produce some $5 billion a
year worth of oil. The Americans will rotate out every three months.

As a sign of how dangerous a place this is, the Army also is sending in a
medical evacuation team that includes several Blackhawk helicopters and
their crews, a surgeon and nurse and several trained medics. They will be
based with the Special Forces team in Arauca to provide emergency medical
care and evacuation for any Americans wounded in the area.

Smaller Special Forces teams have been in Arauca and Saravena for the last
two months, setting up communications and intelligence-gathering
facilities, building heavily fortified living and working quarters in
compounds in the middle of the Colombian Army facilities, and planning the
training mission.

Rings of concertina wire and heavily fortified bunkers surround the Special
Forces compounds. In Arauca, the compound has a tall guard tower with
security cameras and motion-activated perimeter lights. A sergeant said
they had filled more than 70,000 sandbags to construct a head-high wall
around the compound.

The Americans based in Arauca will advise and assist the Colombian Army's
18th Brigade, which guards the long border with Venezuela, runs operations
against terrorists and attempts to secure the Cano Limon pipeline in this
region. Those based in Saravena will run five-week training courses for
units assigned to protect the pipeline, in hopes they will begin more
aggressive operations against the rebels.

The threat is real. In 2001, there were 127 attacks on the pipeline in the
Arauca area. Last year there were only 26 attacks on the pipeline, but
officials said the rebels had begun shifting their attacks to oil wells and
crucial pumping stations in the field.

A flight along the pipeline, which in places is only a few hundred yards
from the river that marks the border with Venezuela, reveals a land scarred
by the rebel bomb attacks on the pipeline. Square pits hold some of the 2.9
million gallons of oil that spilled in the attacks. Much of it has drained
into creeks and the river or sunk into the ground.

The FARC guerrillas in this area are the only ones in Colombia who have
explosives experts trained by visiting Irish Republican Army bombers. The
FARC specialists have been taught to make and fire huge homemade mortar
bombs crafted from small propane tanks.

Other groups have carried out bloody car-bombings in the towns and villages
nearby - attacks against Colombians caught in an intramural battle between
the FARC and the ELN for control of an area that pumps more than $100
million into the rebels' coffers each year, money skimmed from oil revenues
earmarked for local governments.

The Colombian commander here estimates that there are more than 3,000
rebels in his region. Last year rebels killed some 300 people and carried
out seven car bombings and 28 kidnappings. The Colombian Army in Arauca
killed 31 FARC guerrillas and captured 146 last year; killed 13 ELN rebels
and captured 91; and killed 11 paramilitary members and captured 20. It
captured 139 narco-terrorists and destroyed 14 cocaine-processing labs.

Gen. Tom Hill, the commander of U.S. Southern Command in Miami, toured
Colombian military installations last week, including stops at Arauca and
Saravena, as well as Tres Esquinas in the prime coca-growing region of
Putumayo. Colombian Brig. Gen. Roberto Pizzaro told Hill that an aggressive
spraying program assisted by U.S. aid had defoliated the coca crop on more
than 120,000 acres in his region.

Colombia is the world's largest grower of coca, the plant from which
cocaine is derived. The United States has provided $1.3 billion in military
aid to help curb narcotics trafficking here.

While some environmental groups and Democrats in the U.S. Congress oppose
spraying because of its potential for ecological damage, Pizzaro pleaded
with the visiting Americans for an early February spraying. He said such a
quick turnaround would bring those who plant and harvest coca "to their
knees." Respraying isn't scheduled until June, and in the interim two
harvests of coca leaves could be brought in.

Hill said the spraying program "is not as fast as some would like, but it
is very successful." Other U.S. officials said pressure for spraying
Colombia's opium poppy crops - which are refined into heroin exported to
the United States - had diverted resources from the campaign against coca.

Hill added, "We have got to stay the course. This problem wasn't created
overnight and it won't be solved overnight. It is doable but a frustrating
process."

He said he was "cautiously optimistic that the Colombian people have
decided they are going to rid themselves of this problem. They elected
Alvaro Uribe president, and that is a major step."

Hill said Uribe understood that there was no military solution to
Colombia's problems, "but he also understands there is no solution to
anything without security and stability. It is a delicate balancing act."

Meanwhile, in Saravena, America's Green Berets soon will begin training
young Colombian soldiers in the art of counter-guerrilla warfare, in a
place so bad that neither they nor the soldiers dare go out the main gate
except in large, heavily armed contingents.