VENEZUELA: Blood in the Street

In’ the short, optimistic months of Venezuela’s Action Democrdtica government, bright young (31) Leonardo Ruiz Pineda was a cabinet minister. In the same period, tough Pedro Estrada was a small-time detective, spying for various Caribbean dictators. The overthrow of the legally elected A.D. regime by a military junta in November 1948 changed the course of both men’s lives.

Ruiz Pineda escaped from a junta prison after five months. Finding himself the ranking leader of the outlawed party, he went underground. Cool-headed Ruiz Pineda seemed to thrive on his dangerous life, moving around Caracas at night, seldom sleeping two days in the same house, turning out clandestine newspapers, meeting his lieutenants and bragging of his sixth sense for danger.

A year ago, the junta fired its secret police chief and put ex-Gumshoe Pedro Estrada in the job. His orders: get Ruiz Pineda in 30 days. Estrada tracked the resistance boss one night to a Caracas apartment-house district, and surrounded the building with 80 cops. But while Estrada watched, Ruiz Pineda shot his way to freedom. In the months since then, Estrada has been searching Caracas, house by house, for clues leading to the slippery man he knew was never more than a few blocks or a few miles away.

Last week, not long after Caracas’ brief dusk, Ruiz Pineda, now 36, was riding in a green Chevrolet through an area of garages, bars and small factories on the city’s southern edge. Somehow, Pedro Estrada’s men had been tipped off about Ruiz Pineda’s route. Two police agents on a motorcycle picked up the Chevrolet. The car stopped and Ruiz Pineda and three others jumped out. The fleeing men and the police exchanged half a dozen shots. One man fell. By the time a crowd had gathered, Ruiz Pineda, his luck run out at last, lay dead on the pavement.