Death of Black Blood

Slowly but surely, Colombians are writing an end to la violencia, which began in 1948 as a political war between the Conservative and Liberal parties, continued as degenerate terrorism long after the leaders made peace, and now has claimed 200,000 lives in the country's backlands. In March, troops trapped and killed "Desquite" ("Revenge"), one of the most notorious of the bandit leaders; in the past 15 months they have erased three other bandits responsible for 1,100 murders among them. Last week the most vicious killer still at large met his death. He was Jacinto Cruz Usma, 31, alias "Sangre Negra," or "Black Blood," and regarded by the government as Public Enemy No. 1.

223 Lives. No one knows why Cruz became a bandit; he came from a peaceful peasant family in the department of Tolima, started out as a hardworking laborer, then suddenly turned up three years ago as Sangre Negra. On March 20, 1961, he burned a hacienda and chopped three men to ribbons with a machete. Seven months later, he and his gang ambushed two police trucks, killing eight policemen. Three months after that, Sangre Negra halted a bus, lined up 17 passengers, slaughtered them all. He kidnaped children, carried off women to be raped and murdered, boldly shot it out with the army. Last September, while President Guillermo Leon Valencia was decorating army officers at Armero in Tolima, Sangre Negra contemptuously sacked a nearby town, Totarito, adding 28 more deaths to the list. Though there is no accurate record, authorities place the blood of 223 on his hands.

In the end it was Sangre Negra's own brother, Felipe, 32, who did him in. Hearing that his outlaw kin was coming to kill him, or so he said, Felipe went to the police in the small town of El Cairo, then joined the posse sent to track his brother down. They found Sangre Negra and three of his men terrorizing a farm family a short way out of town. In a blazing 25-minute gunfight, one of the bandits was killed. But when the posse rushed the farmhouse, Sangre Negra and the others were gone. Two days later reinforcements killed his two henchmen a few miles away. But still no Sangre Negra. Back they went with dogs to search around the farmhouse. There he was, dead, in the jungle a thousand yards away, face down in a mudhole with bullet holes in his mouth and torso. Mortally wounded in the first fight, he had crawled into the brush to die.

Cortege of Survivors. A helicopter carried the body to army headquarters at Ibague, where 25,000 people passed by the litter to stare and make sure that Sangre Negra was really dead. The corpse was then helicoptered to four other mountain towns for display. At last, he was buried in an unmarked grave. Soldiers acted as pallbearers, and the survivors of the Totarito massacre marched behind in a bitter cortege.

The last major outlaw remaining at large is Pedro Antonio Marin, 32, who goes under the aliases of "Marulanda" and "Tiro Fijo" (''Sure Shot"). A bragging Communist, he leads a band of 300 and rules a fief in the hills of south western Colombia by both persuasion and force. The army is cutting away his peasant support with a program of roads, medical aid and agricultural advice. Patrols are pressing the hunt.

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