November 16, 2003

"God bless the guerillas for killing those bandits," she said, giving her name only as Ercilia. "The military government aren't people. They're just a rotten plague."

The woman was referring to a wave of military strikes in the surrounding mountains against rebel leaders who have reportedly been preparing a major offensive on Bogota, the capital. Scores of soldiers and paramilitaries have been killed since early October -- marking the most significant blows to President Alvaro Uribe's campaign to defeat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The army's failure also reveals the deepening U.S. cooperation in Colombia's counterinsurgency effort, which, while not a secret anymore, has little exposure compared to the American-led conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No U.S. official would comment on whether U.S. cooperation extended to the recent assaults. But they acknowledge that since February U.S. military advisers have aided the Colombian army's counterinsurgency operations. In April, military personnel from the Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., completed training of an elite commando battalion.

"The commandos have been employed against high-value targets," said a U.S. official based in Colombia, who asked not to be named for security reasons. "(We're assisting) in plans for operations down to division and brigade levels,
looking at operational, logistical and intelligence components of a plan." He stressed that there is no intention to send U.S. advisers on combat missions.

U.S. military instructors, some of whom have recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, trained the hand-picked commandos to operate deep behind guerilla lines, carry out reconnaissance patrols, call in strikes on rebel targets, rappel out of helicopters and fight in darkness with the help of night-vision goggles. Training for a second battalion is planned next year.

The expanding role of U.S. forces in both training and operational planning reflects last year's vote by the U.S. Congress to broaden its $3 billion aid to Bogota over four years and help Uribe wage a "unified campaign" against illegal drugs and the guerrillas, who have been waging a war with the central government for the past 40 years.

The decision came against the backdrop of President Bush's global war on terrorism and Washington's insistence that FARC members are "narco-terrorists" involved in producing, processing and trafficking cocaine and heroin and which may now have "weapons of mass destruction".

The move marked a sharp departure from previous policy, in which U.S. authorities insisted they would fund only counter-narcotics programs and not risk getting involved in this Andean nation's four-decade-old civil conflict.

The Colombian army's offensive against the FARC in Cundinamarca, a province a sixth of the size of California, is code-named Operation Liberty-1 and led by Gen. Reinaldo Castellanos. He is commander of the army's Fifth Division, which includes members of a recently-inaugurated U.S.-trained commando battalion. In a recent interview at his office in division headquarters in northern Bogota, Castellanos smiled when asked about the U.S. assistance. "I don't like to talk too much about that," he said. But he is clear when asked about the task that lies ahead.

"These (rebel) units have been trying to close the circle around Bogota, but that capacity has now been neutralized," he said. "We must continue to attack to break up the support networks and the urban fronts inside Bogota."

Earlier this month, the army says it intercepted a radio communication by FARC's top military strategist, Jorge Briceno, to rebel fronts in early November that said: "We have to go after these dogs (the army) with all we've got. That's the highest honor we can pay to our fallen comrades."

The Colombian army's top brass has made little secret that they would like to kill or capture one of the FARC's seven-man supreme leadership, known as the general secretariat. The U.S. official said American forces would be willing to help in that endeavor.