Senseless Slaughter

Along a rural road in western Colombia early this month, some 40 men dressed as soldiers swarmed out from behind roadside boulders and halted an oncoming auto. Brandishing rifles and submachine guns, the men in uniform --bandits in disguise -- ordered the three frightened riders out of the car, marched them to a nearby abandoned house, and tied them up. That done, the bandits returned to their hiding place be side the road.

During the next half-hour or so, the bandits halted a loaded passenger bus and three government trucks carrying road workers. Each time the captors herded their prisoners back to the house. Then, after systematically robbing them, the bandits cold-bloodedly beat and hacked 42 male prisoners to death with clubs and machetes. Several men and women were spared and later released; others managed to escape. In the town of Manzanares the day after the massacre, 24 of the victims were buried in a mass funeral.

The massacre was unmistakably the work of a bandit gang led by William Aranguren, nicknamed Desquite (Revenge). A onetime army private who flunked out of military police school, Aranguren wears an army captain's uniform, plans his attacks like grand military campaigns. To help assure his getaway after the slaughter, Aranguren had his men cut telephone lines to surrounding towns.

Last week 2,000 soldiers and policemen, aided by air force helicopters, were searching for the Aranguren gang. A detachment of troops caught up with the bandits one evening, but after an hour-long exchange of gunfire, darkness fell and the gang escaped. At week's end Aranguren was still at large, although authorities had offered rewards totaling 130,000 pesos ($13,000) for information leading to his capture.

The Aranguren massacre was one of the bloodiest in Colombia's 15-year agony of backlands violence, which has cost well over 200,000 lives. What began in 1948 as partisan warfare between Liberals and Conservatives has degenerated over the years into banditry and blood lust virtually devoid of any political meaning. The senseless slaughter goes on although the Liberal and Conservative parties agreed to a truce in 1957. President Guillermo Leon Valencia, a Conservative, has pressed the search for known bandits; but the campaign to hunt them down appears to make some bandit chieftains all the more savage. Until the roadside massacre, Aranguren usually released his robbery victims, but after slaughtering the 42 men, he gave the survivors an ominous warning to carry away with them: "It will happen again."

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