BY FRANCES ROBLES

  LA PLATA, Colombia - The 13-year-old girl guerrilla -- a survivor of heavy combat here Thursday -- sported an oversized Revolutionary Armed Forces of
  Colombia camouflage uniform and a tear down her cheek as her nation's highest military command peppered her with questions.

  ''Were you forced to join?'' Defense Minister Gustavo Bell asked.

  ''What are you doing in this mess?'' army chief Jorge Enrique Mora questioned.

  ''Can you even carry a rifle?'' Bell wondered.

  Twelve hours of heavy fighting killed at least 30 people in southern Colombia's Huila province Thursday, one of several battles in the region last week.
  When the shooting was over and bodies were counted, Bell said more than half the dead were boys and girls not yet 16. Three survivors were girls:
  ages 13, 15 and 16.

  The teens are among a growing division of Colombia's leftist insurgency known as the FARC: youth recruited as soldiers and spies. Armed Forces chief
  Gen. Fernando Tapias has estimated that a third of the FARC's 17,000 soldiers are minors.

  Even military officials acknowledged that their success on the battlefield Thursday -- just one soldier wounded -- had more to do with rebel novice than
  military acumen. The army attacked the jungle fighters after a FARC offensive on small Huila towns, the army said. After 12 hours of fighting, 32 rebels
  were killed and 16 detained, Tapias said.

  A day later, Colombian military command and reporters visited the site, a breathtaking countryside about 215 miles southwest of the capital. Military
  chiefs honored the Armed Forces for valiant service; soldiers accepted the praise while standing beside 30 lifeless guerrillas arranged in two neat rows.

  Some were burned, some bloody, some just boys. Although the ages of the unidentified dead are officially unknown, the limbs poking out from under
  blue sheets gave it away. These were small and hairless legs of adolescents.

  ''This is the great tragedy,'' said Bell, also Colombia's vice president. ``Who knows how many of these children had musical talent or mathematical
  talent? They are our future.''

  Although Colombia's two other illegal armies, the leftist National Liberation Army and rightist United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, also recruit child
  warriors, Mora said 80 percent of child soldiers are FARC members.

  A 1998 study by the national Office of the People's Defender showed that 18 percent of child combatants had killed someone, and 60 percent had
  watched people being killed. Some 25 percent had seen kidnappings, and 28 percent had been wounded.

  For a time, even the Colombian military drafted 16- and 17-year-olds without parental consent. The practice has ended, and in 1999, the government
  discharged 980 soldiers who were younger than 18.

  Despite U.S.-financed programs to rehabilitate the youths, military generals say thousands of adolescents, some as young as 9, are forced under threat
  by guerrilla commanders to join their forces. Still others are lured by food.

  An estimated 6.5 million of Colombia's 17 million children live in poverty. Studies indicate that at least 100,000 children displaced by war don't attend
  school, and 2.5 million others work to support themselves.

  President-elect Alvaro Uribe has vowed to create 1 million new school seats to make room for children with no access to education. Elected on a hard-line
  anti-guerrilla platform, Uribe takes office Aug. 7.

  ''There are social and economic needs in Colombia, but that's not just Colombia -- that's all of Latin America,'' Mora said during an interview Friday. ``You
  don't see children in other Latin American countries working as guerrillas. You have poverty and other limitations in other Latin American countries, and
  you don't have insurgencies.''

  The FARC formed in 1964 as a Marxist insurgency to force social justice in rural Colombia, where poverty is rampant and development often shoddy. The
  group has since become a 17,500-strong militia financed by the drug and kidnapping trades.

  Peace talks with the group ended abruptly in February, and its leaders were declared fugitives. The government recently announced $2 million rewards
  for information leading to the arrest of the FARC's highest commanders.

  'These delinquents, [FARC commanders Jorge Briceño known as] `Mono Jojoy' and [Manuel] Marulanda are in hiding while they send children off to fight,''
  Tapias said. ``I don't understand it. How can they send children to fight? They're off hiding with drug money and thousands of bottles of whiskey while
  they send these children to die.''

  The girl grilled by the vice president Friday had few answers.

  ''I joined,'' the 13-year-old said, ``because I felt like joining.''