TV show gives Colombia's military a lift

 BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 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 Bogotá.

 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 Andrés 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. Héctor
 Gómez, 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.''