'Homicidal Hero

MEXICO Homicidal Hero When a killer is captured in Mexico, corridas (streetcorner ballads) often glamorize him in heroic verse. Last week Mexicans sang a new corrida,. It was about El Gitano ("The Gypsy"), suspected of assassinating the Governor of Sinaloa, bearded, music-loving Rodolfo T. Loaiza.

Said Stanza I: In Mazatlan, a tall man masked like the other dancers at fhe Carnival ball shot jovial Loaiza through the head. Two Americans were murdered when they tried to prevent the man's escape. Rodolfo Valdez, 28, known as El Gitano, took to the hills.

Said Stanza II: For a year El Gitano's gang, beloved by the local peasantry, eluded all searching parties. Finally, Mexico's President Manuel Avila Camacho sent a general to Sinaloa. The general carried the President's promise: if El Gitano would surrender, he would not be shot. Flattered, El Gitano agreed.

Said Stanza III: Last week El Gitano, held in the fortress of Santiago Tlaltelolco, had implicated important people in Loaiza's murder, was the hero of the day.

Envoi: He was a two-gun man. He was called a gypsy for his capaciousness. He divided his time (when he was not shooting people) between his mother, his beautiful Japanese wife, his many sweethearts. A real mujeriego (wolf), it took him only a few days to bring any woman under the spell of his green eyes. For fun he liked to shoot at the jars carried on the lovely heads of Sinaloa maidens, sportively drenching them with water. Only once did he ever miss. He killed a girl instead of hitting the daisy she was putting in her hair. El Gitano wept.

Prosaic Thriller. The prosaic facts about El Gitano were as exciting as the corrido. He was the leader of an outlaw-band which often held up big mining companies on pay day, distributed the payroll to poor mountaineers. An illiterate former peon, El Gitano paid his debts by holding out a huge roll of bills. Creditors took what they liked. His "G," scrawled on a .38 bullet, was a safe-conduct pass through Sinaloa's lonely hills.

An excellent horseman, El Gitano went on foot in the mountains to escape detection. In town he would throw off his rags, dress immaculately, ride in taxis. El Gitano began his shooting career when bandits killed his father, raped his sister. Since then, he was credited with more than 100 murders, some for money, some "just for the hell of it."

At week's end the balladeers were busy on a new corrido. In Guadalajara, Sinaloa Congressman Rosendo G. Castro had been shot and killed at a party given in his honor. But this time El Gitano was not the homicidal hero. He was safely under Government lock & key.

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