Colombian Court Staff Strikes for Safety

Court employees crippled the judicial system yesterday with their third strike of the anti-drug war, led by judges who want guns and bulletproof cars for protection from assassins hired by cocaine barons.

A union of judges and court workers said this strike had no time limit. The first strike lasted a week and the second three days.

Also yesterday, all 42 of Medellin's federal judges announced they were resigning, according to the Colombian radio network RCN. They had begun an indefinite strike Thursday, demanding more protection from drug traffickers.

The resignations are not effective unless accepted by the Supreme Court, which usually does not accept such en masse actions.

For the first time in the three strikes, court workers took their protest to the streets yesterday. Several dozen blocked busy 19th St. in downtown Bogota and some exchanged blows with about 50 riot police who tried to clear the streets.

No one was arrested and the street was not cleared.

Strike banners hung from the windows of the downtown building where scores of judges have offices.

Even the Supreme Court, which never goes on strike, said the government had been remiss in not giving judges and their helpers more protection.

"We consider that it is exceptionally difficult to administer quick and complete justice under the current working conditions," the president of the 24-member court, Fabio Moron Diaz, said in a statement.

Drug traffickers have killed three federal judges in three months, one just befoer President Virgilio Barco declared war on the cocaine cartels in August. They have shown no sign of easing a terror campaign aimed at forcing the government to end extraditions to the United States.

A car bomb exploded in Bogota shortly before midnight Thursday, killing four people, including a child. Three other small bombs went off Thursday night and a fourth was deactivated, Bogota police reported.

Yesterday afternoon, two men on a motorcycle threw a homemade bomb at a clothing store in Medellin and a woman and child were cut by glass from windows shattered by the explosion, police reported. They said the terrorists escaped and the victims were hospitalized in stable condition.

No one claimed responsibility, but security forces assume the scores of explosions that began in August are the work of the drug gangs. The 186 bombings reported have killed 29 people and wounded at least 228.

The court strike began in stages Thursday after federal judge Mariela Espinoza was shot down with automatic weapons Wednesday in front of her home in Medellin, headquarters of the most notorious cocaine cartel.

Forty-three judges and 179 other court employees have been killed in Colombia during the past eight years, many of them by drug traffickers.

On Oct. 28, the bodies of two court workers were found in a river in Cali, hands tied behind them, police in the western city said yesterday. Cali is the base of another major drug gang.

The National Association of Court Workers, which declared the strike, began months ago demanding bulletproof vests and cars, guns, weapons training, bodyguards, metal detectors for offices and even devices that detect fumes emitted by dynamite.