By Serge F. Kovaleski
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday , March 9, 2000 ; A19

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 8 –– Marxist guerrillas firing homemade missiles heavily damaged a town in southwest Colombia
and freed 92 inmates from a prison there in the largest jailbreak carried out by rebel forces in almost two years, authorities
reported today.

Officials said that at about 8 p.m. Tuesday, several hundred fighters belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), the country's largest insurgent group, stormed the town of El Bordo, 250 miles southwest of Bogota, to liberate
guerrillas recently captured in Colombia's deepening 37-year-old civil conflict.

No one was reported killed or injured during the six-hour onslaught, in which rebels launched a barrage of projectiles made of
gas cylinders packed with explosives, hurled grenades and strafed buildings with gunfire as they battled about 40 police officers
trying to defend the community of 5,000 residents.

In the end, El Bordo prison director Luis Eduardo Ledesma told Caracol radio this morning, the attacking FARC troops burst
into the prison and ordered the guards to disarm and leave. "The guerrillas released 92 prisoners, who then fled. The rebels
opened the doors but did not destroy the prison," Justice Minister Romulo Gonzalez told reporters here in the capital.

As the rebels made off with an undetermined number of freed insurgents, El Bordo lay badly damaged with two dozen
buildings, including the police station, reduced to rubble. Aside from the prison, one of the few structures left standing was the
Roman Catholic church, where windows were shattered by shrapnel while dozens of worshipers huddled in corners and under
pews.

"The town was basically destroyed. It has been reduced to a pile of smoldering embers," a Defense Ministry official said. "What
is truly alarming is that the FARC showed up with extremely powerful weapons that, sophisticated or not, caused tremendous
destruction."

The escalating nature of Colombia's civil war, in which 30,000 people have been killed in the past decade, has become a major
issue in Washington as President Clinton seeks congressional approval of a $1.6 billion, two-year assistance package that he
says is needed to help stanch the flow of cocaine and heroin into the United States from Colombia.

Some wary U.S. lawmakers fear that by providing more military training and equipment to Colombia, the United States could
be dragged into the war. The rebels finance much of their operations through the drug trade.

Other legislators worry about operational links between the Colombian army and illegal right-wing paramilitary groups
responsible for human-rights violations.

Although the 15,000-member FARC and the government of President Andres Pastrana are holding peace talks, the rebels
have not agreed to a cease-fire. Furthermore, the FARC is holding about 350 police and soldiers, whom it captured in the past
two years. It has demanded that the government release about 400 guerrillas in exchange for the release of the security officers.

The government, however, has rejected any such arrangement. Consequently, the rebels have launched intermittent attacks on
prisons such as the one in El Bordo to liberate insurgents. In May 1998, in the largest jailbreak ever in Colombia, FARC rebels
stormed San Isidro Prison in Popayan, 230 miles southwest of Bogota, and set free 324 inmates, many of whom were FARC
fighters.