Documentary : Searching for Justice Behind the Two-Way Mirror : * In Colombia’s courthouses, fearful judges went faceless. Now, under the cover of screens and voice distorters, they preside over the trials of dangerous drug lords.

“Welcome,” says the guttural, metallic voice, sounding more like a 21st-Century cyborg than a 20th-Century Colombian judge whose life is threatened by his country’s drug barons.

The judge sits in an adjoining room, invisible behind a two-way mirror. The eerie voice passes through an electronic distorter before beaming from two speakers in a small cubicle in Cali’s justice palace. “Of course I am afraid,” it admits. “But that will not stop me from accepting my responsibility and handing down fair decisions.”

This so-called faceless judge is part of a special jurisdiction charged with trying some of the world’s most dangerous drug suspects in a country where 245 justice officials and workers have been assassinated since 1981.

Extradition of the alleged drug lords is banned by the constitution, so it’s up to Colombia’s threatened judicial system to punish them. That’s why the government is using a system of voice distorters, two-way mirrors and high-security offices to try to protect the identities of 102 such judges in several cities.

Eight to 10 of the special judges have been assigned to Cali, where some of them will handle cases involving this city’s major drug figures--Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, Jose Santacruz Londono and Hernando Giraldo Londono.

Unlike Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar, who surrendered recently and also faces trial in Colombia, the Cali cocaine kingpins are still at large. They are said to have informants working for them within the local government and judicial system, increasing the risk to the judges.

Fear of a new wave of attacks on the judicial branch increased last month when unidentified gunmen assassinated a Cali judge and court investigator. Many Colombians believe it is more than coincidence that the killings followed court decisions to reopen a drug trafficking case against Rodriguez Orejuela and to accuse Santacruz of participation in the 1989 murder of a state governor.

“With the two murders in Cali, we are beginning to see a new campaign of extermination against judges,” Antonio Suarez, president of the National Judicial Employees Assn., known as Asonal, said in an interview.

“Here there are not just faceless judges but brainless judges because we keep working in the face of these threats,” said Omar Eduardo Garces, Asonal’s regional president in Cali.

Garces spoke on a day when Cali judicial workers were striking to protest the latest assassinations, and as he did so he roamed his office searching for what he bitterly called symbols of Colombian justice--a human skull and photographs of himself with four or five colleagues, “all of them dead now.”

His office also serves as a coffee stop for several survivors of the violence, including a federal judge who has been shot five times--once in the head--and a municipal judge who came home one evening to find his dog hanging from a chandelier and his walls painted with threats.

They and other judicial officials say it’s not only drug traffickers who strike out at the justice system.

“Any criminal in this country who wants to either threaten or kill a judge can very easily do it,” Suarez said. For that reason, he and other Asonal officials argue for much more sweeping government protection and increased financing for the whole judicial system.

In fact, however, the 1991 budget for the judicial branch stayed at about its 1990 level of $56 million. Justice expenditures, equivalent to 1% of the national budget, have shrunk in real terms this year compared to last.

The government believes that its only option is to protect a select few judges who handle the most dangerous cases. And Colombia’s 29-year-old justice minister, Fernando Carrillo, is confident that the special jurisdiction program will work.

“The one thing that is very clear,” he said in his Bogota office, “is that Colombia, more than ever, can demonstrate to the international community that we have an effective system in place capable of processing, judging and sentencing these drug traffickers.”

Indeed, the conviction rate under the new system, decreed last year by President Cesar Gaviria, is up to 70%, contrasted with less than 10% in ordinary courts. But until now most cases have involved cartel middlemen and contract killers. The faceless judges have yet to take on a big fish like Escobar or Rodriguez. Several major trials, including those of Escobar and his cartel partners, are scheduled for next year.

The special judges themselves appear more wary about such trials than does Carrillo, although they praise the government for what they say is its first real effort to protect them.

“We are the most secure judges in the country,” commented the electronic voice beamed into the justice palace cubicle here. “We appreciate the government’s effort but think it should be applied to all of our colleagues.”

Guillermo Castro, the Cali official in charge of distributing the drug cases and overseeing the judges’ work, acknowledged that “someone like Rodriguez could theoretically find out which judge is handling his case.”

Moreover, he conceded that there is only one armored car for every three of his judges, that they lack bodyguards, and that office security is less than ideal.

On a tour of the Cali justice building, Castro nevertheless stressed that the system is a vast improvement over the old days, when the judges met face to face with attorneys and defendants.

Defense attorneys have criticized the faceless judge system as a violation of a defendant’s right to confront his accusers. Castro responds that under Colombia’s Napoleonic system, the judge is required to receive testimony from different sources, often in the form of written affidavits, and then rule on it and other evidence. There is no cross-examination of witnesses and no jury, as in the U.S. system.

“The only reason lawyers want to confront the judge is to try to intimidate or bribe him,” Castro said, mocking defense attorneys by waving his finger at an imaginary judge. “See how easy it is? The lawyer is only inches away from the judge’s face. I tell you that the majority of decisions made in these offices are the product of intimidation.”

The faceless judge in Cali agreed: “The international community, North American journalists and all people who think human rights should be defended must understand that in my country, the suspects, their attorneys, even well-connected politicians want to pressure the judicial process through bribes and threats. They have raised the flag of human rights to regain the power of reaching the judge. We must be protected from these pressures.”

The judge admitted having received both threats and offers of money from attorneys. “If I had paid attention to them I wouldn’t be here now.”

Defendants processed by the special jurisdiction are tried in a cubicle where they see only themselves and their attorneys in the two-way mirror and hear the same robotic male voice no matter which judge is trying their case.

“It does not matter if the traffickers discover our identities,” said the faceless judge interviewed here. “What matters is that they not be able to discover which one of us is handling which case.”

Then, unexpectedly, the individual with the electronically distorted voice agreed on condition of anonymity to come out from behind the two-way mirror and meet the journalist face to face.

The voice, it turned out, belonged to not one, but two judges--both young women. Standing a few minutes later in a windowless conference room, they laughed at their visitor’s surprise.

The women, dressed in cotton blouses and skirts, appeared relaxed as they talked about how much more work they were able to get done under the new system. “Our old jobs were more like public relations,” one said. “Now we can simply work without having to face someone every five minutes.”

Both women, chosen for the jobs by a federal judicial council, admitted that the system also has its drawbacks. Without the protection of bodyguards, the two judges must frequently change their routes to work. They avoid eating out, but when they do, they make sure not to frequent the same restaurant.

“Our social life is not ideal,” one of the judges said. “We accept that as a consequence of our work.”