Media : Colombia Tries to Program a Better Image for Medellin : Through the TV show ‘Arriba Mi Barrio’ the government is showing that the city is more than a lair for drug lords.

“Can you tell me something unusual about your neighborhood?”

The TV host’s question sparked imagination in the alert faces of his guests: 10 children, ages 7 to 12, from the crowded barrios of Medellin. Several hands shot up.

“My neighborhood celebrates Christmas and New Year’s very united,” boasted 11-year-old Elisa. “We make Nativity scenes during school vacations.”

“We have sales,” chimed in Natalia, 8. “We sell little meat pies and share the money with the poor.”

“Good!” exclaimed the host, pleased by the positive images beaming to viewers throughout the Medellin valley.

Then it was Jerson Herrera’s turn.

“The most curious thing about my neighborhood,” began the 12-year-old boy, eager for this chance to speak his mind, “is that we don’t need the army or the police to tame us. We’re not beasts, but they come and brutalize us. We can live more peacefully without them.”

Welcome to “Arriba Mi Barrio” (Up With My Neighborhood), Medellin’s attempt through unfettered talk on live television to face up to--and live down--its infamy as one of the world’s most violent cities.

An Andean metropolis of 2 million people known as the cocaine capital of the world, Medellin has recorded an average of 20 homicides a day so far this year, most of them a result of gang warfare spawned by the drug trade. That is about seven times the 1990 murder rate in much larger Los Angeles.

Sicarios , the hired teen-age killers at the center of Medellin’s mayhem for years, have been pitied, romanticized and explained in popular books and films, darkening the shadow of notoriety over the entire city.

“Arriba Mi Barrio” is the government’s answer--the showpiece of an emergency project to improve the image and the reality of Medellin’s slums. Aired every Friday afternoon, the 2 1/2-hour TV show gives a voice to the whole community, especially to struggling civic boosters.

“Medellin is a caldron of life and death,” said Alonso Salazar, author of a best-selling collection of sicarios ‘ oral histories. “We have spoken enough about death. Now it’s time to speak a little about life so we can help the city get out of this crisis.”

From his new perspective as one of the TV program’s hosts, the 31-year-old journalist notes: “In every corner you can find a committee, a group, an association of people trying to save the city.”

The task of harnessing this energy belongs to Maria Emma Mejia, a 36-year-old documentary filmmaker who is the co-host for the show. President Cesar Gaviria appointed her last August as his counselor for Medellin, the only city to get such top-level attention.

With a two-year budget of $16.7 million, she was charged with getting 74,000 idle children into school, creating jobs for 130,000 unemployed adults, restoring the people’s lost confidence in the police and other government institutions and sustaining a network of 280 civic action groups that have sprung up in recent months.

Despite some progress--425 new teachers hired and 90 civic projects funded--the killing has not abated. The notorious Medellin drug cartel is in retreat, throwing its newly jobless sicario enforcers into a life of disorganized crime.

Private vigilante groups are rising to “cleanse” the city of the sicarios , drug addicts and other suspected criminals. Off-duty policemen often join in the killing spree, human rights activists say.

This anarchy makes Mejia optimistic that the worst is over.

“It sounds absurd, but this is natural in a postwar situation,” she said. “There is more violence today because there is more disorder, but in social and psychological terms the city is not as terrorized as it was a year ago,” when the drug mafia openly confronted the government. “There is an atmosphere of relative hope.”

Trying to nurture that climate, Mejia persuaded Teleantioquia, the regional station, to develop a community-oriented show. The University of Antioquia and the privately funded Regional Corp. joined the project, and “Arriba Mi Barrio” made its debut March 29.

The program is packaged around a popular Hollywood movie each week to entice viewers from the soap operas on national channels. Before and after the movie, paisas , as citizens of Medellin are known, speak their minds in random interviews from their neighborhoods, as invited guests in the studio or over the telephone on live TV.

“We’re an escape valve,” Mejia said. “People use the show to confront the authorities. It’s a form of non-armed aggression.”

Hosts try to elicit upbeat comments. But no subject is taboo, and the city’s dark side gets aired often.

One woman called to ask whether she should take her 10-year-old son, who was stealing in the neighborhood and violently mistreating her, to the police station to be left in jail. “Where did I go wrong?” she asked. A man phoning from a drug rehabilitation center repented his past as a killer.

The show’s ratings haven’t been taken yet, but interviews in Medellin indicate it is extremely popular, especially in the poor northeast comunas , or slums, where people are most eager to erase the stigma of violence.

“The people of the comunas see that they can tell their own reality on this program,” said Ana Maria Cano, a city councilwoman. “They’re happy that finally somebody is coming to their neighborhood with some other purpose than to kill them.”

The poor also welcome the show as a forum to appeal for dignified treatment. Asked on the air how she would like the world to be, a girl from the comunas said: “A nicer, more humble place, where the rich don’t humiliate you.”

Mejia said she is trying to demolish “the Berlin Wall” between the comunas and the rest of the city. But nine out of 10 phone calls received on the show are from the northeast, so she is trying to get more youngsters from the prosperous southern suburbs involved.

In any case, the program is watched in every part of town. Schoolteachers play videotapes of it to stimulate classroom discussion. About 120 children have formed an “Arriba Mi Barrio” fan club to organize social gatherings and swap ideas on how to improve their neighborhoods.

Jerson Herrera, the boy who complained on the show about the police, said the program has inspired some troublemakers in his northeast comuna , Barrio Zamora, to go straight.

“(The program) brings them a message, a message that the police cannot transmit because they treat us so badly,” Jerson said in an interview off the air. “Some sicarios told me they were watching the program to change. . . . Many who were drug addicts gave up drugs because of it.”

Col. Aldemar Bedoya, Medellin’s police chief, said he watches the program and listens to the criticism of his officers.

“Not all people in the comunas are gangsters, but a high percentage of them sure are,” he said. “These people have no reason to like us, and we don’t like them either. But we’re trying to be more sensitive. We’re doing civic action. We’re disarming the (aggressive) spirit of the police and trying to help these communities.”

To hear it from kids, the police have a long way to go. Asked on the air what she would do if elected president of Colombia, 9-year-old Viviana Morales did not hesitate.

“The government runs the police,” she replied, “but it runs them in a cruel way. It tells them to kill. It shouldn’t be that way. I’d tell them to stop. . . .”

The guest host, a popular Colombian comedian, cut her off, signaling the end of the show.

“This is the spontaneity of the children. We didn’t prepare any of this,” he declared, grinning nervously at the camera. “It seems that we all dream of a much better world, and that’s what this show is about.”