Nine Banks Dynamited in Colombia : Drug Cartel Blamed; Minister of Justice Reportedly Resigns

Amid a campaign of terror by Colombian cocaine barons, bombs exploded Sunday at nine banks--one of the blasts killing a university student--and radio stations reported the resignation of a key Cabinet official in President Virgilio Barco Vargas’ war against the traffickers.

The reports that Justice Minister Monica de Greiff had quit her job appeared to signal weakness in the Cabinet at a time when Barco has called for national unity and determination to fight the powerful and violent drug bosses.

A written statement from the president’s office quoted Barco as saying: “I have not thought about, nor is there reason for, a crisis in the Cabinet. It is something I have not considered now nor for the future.”

Resignation Not Ruled Out

The statement said that Barco “denied information related to the resignation of Justice Minister . . . De Greiff” but did not specifically rule out her resignation.

Seven dynamite bombs exploded before dawn at Banco Cafetero branches in Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city and headquarters of the country’s most notorious cocaine cartel.

Sunday afternoon, bombs went off at two private bank branches in Medellin, the Todelar radio network reported. It said that Jairo Montoya, a 21-year-old student, was killed in the explosion at the Banco de Colombia.

No one was injured in the other bombings. All were regarded as a further attempt by the drug barons to intimidate the country’s political and business power structure.

The Banco Cafetero is a government bank that provides financial support for the coffee business, Colombia’s top legal earner of export income.

A group called “The Extraditables,” known to include leaders of the Medellin drug cartel, announced in a manifesto last Thursday that it was declaring “total and absolute war” on the government, big businessmen and others who oppose the cartel.

Bombs set the same day the manifesto was issued destroyed Medellin offices of the country’s two main political parties, and the country homes of two prominent politicians were burned.

Those bombs and the manifesto came six days after President Barco announced decrees permitting the government to extradite accused drug traffickers to the United States for trial and to seize their properties in Colombia. Since then, the government has conducted more than a thousand anti-narcotics raids, detained thousands of people and seized hundreds of farms, ranches and urban homes.

No one claimed responsibility for Sunday’s bombs, but drug traffickers are suspected, police said. Four bombs that did not explode were found at other Medellin branches of the Banco Cafetero, and another was found at a private bank. Two men were arrested with 88 pounds of dynamite.

An official of the Banco Cafetero said the bombs appeared to be a response by traffickers to the government drive against them.

“This is part of the war that Barco announced,” said Sergio Soto, manager of one of the bombed branches.

‘Foundation of Economy’

“Coffee is the foundation of the Colombian economy, and there is a declared war against public and private interests,” said Juan Maria Cock, the bank’s regional president in Medellin.

The traffickers also have made death threats to numerous judges, officials and journalists in recent days. Justice Minister De Greiff was reported to have received telephone threats last week against herself and her family, and the news agency Colprensa said intelligence agents had discovered a plot against her life.

She left Friday for Washington, where she was scheduled to hold talks with American officials on U.S. anti-narcotics aid. A Colombian official said the minister, who traveled with her husband and 3-year-old son, is not expected to return to Colombia.

Early Sunday afternoon, the Radio Todelar network reported that De Greiff had “resigned in a telephone call to President Barco in recent hours due to a series of threats against her life, and accepting the advice of politicians who recommended that in this moment there should be a person of more experience in this job.”

De Greiff, 32, previously had held no Cabinet position, although she had been vice minister of justice. She is the sixth justice minister appointed since Barco took office in 1986.

Previous Attacks

In 1984, assassins believed to be working for drug traffickers killed Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Enrique Parejo, a justice minister who resigned in 1986 and took an assignment as Colombia’s ambassador in Hungary to escape death threats, was seriously wounded by gunmen who tracked him down in Budapest.

Atty. Gen. Carlos Hoyos was killed in January, 1988. In the latest assassinations attributed to drug traffickers, on Aug. 18, gunmen killed the Medellin commander of the national police as well as Sen. Luis Carlos Galan, a leading candidate for presidential elections next March.

There was no official confirmation of De Greiff’s resignation, and some radio stations said that it would not be made official for 12 days, but the newspaper El Espectador said in its main headline Sunday: “Justice Minister Resigns.”

El Espectador quoted De Greiff as calling herself “a minister for times of peace.” The newspaper also repeated unofficial reports that Barco has considered other Cabinet changes because some ministers had been reluctant to endorse his emergency decrees on extradition and seizure of properties.

Allies in High Places

Antonio Caballero, a columnist for El Espectador and an expert on drug trafficking, wrote in Sunday’s paper that the drug Mafia has allies in high places.

“Not all politicians are like Luis Carlos Galan, and we know it too well: There are hundreds, some presidential hopefuls like him, who are friends of the narcos, their protectors and proteges,” Caballero said. “It is not true, by far, that ‘the whole country’ is at war with the Mafia. On the contrary: Half of the country is its ally, its partner or its hireling.”

Although authorities have arrested several accused traffickers in the past week, including some wanted in the United States, none of the top leaders of the Medellin cartel or other big trafficking groups have been captured. Speculative reports said that Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, Jorge Luis Ochoa and other big bosses might be in neighboring Brazil, Panama, Peru or Ecuador.

A Ministry of Defense spokesman said that Colombian authorities are coordinating their search for the drug barons with Interpol, the international police coordinating organization.

The newspaper El Tiempo reported Sunday that three magistrates of a special tribunal revoked a Colombian arrest warrant against Escobar on Aug. 15. The same three magistrates had previously approved the warrant, but they revoked it after another judge in the case, Helena Diaz Perez, was assassinated.

The warrant charged Escobar with ordering massacres on two banana plantations in which about 30 workers were killed.

Investigators have linked the Medellin cartel to highly trained “paramilitary” death squads that have killed hundreds of leftists and others in rural Colombia.

Party’s Support Promised

Carlos Lleras Restrepo, a former Colombian president and a member of Barco’s Liberal Party, said in an article published Sunday that the president’s battle against the traffickers will have “the clear support of all sectors of the party.”

But Ernesto Samper, one of the Liberal Party’s several presidential hopefuls, proposed a national referendum on whether “to stop the war against narco-trafficking.”

“If the government does not have sufficient means to go ahead with this struggle, it should not continue,” Samper said. “But if the course taken is to maintain the repression, we have to be ready to pay the price.”

DRUG LORDS ON RUN

Colombia’s top 12 traffickers are “marked men,” Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh said. Page 10