BRAZIL: Lurid Top

Some of Rio’s most recent crimes have reached the top strata of lurid violence. Samples: 1) borrowing a time-worn page from the Aztecs, a boy cut out his beloved’s heart; 2) using a sharp hatchet, a man chopped his wife into small pieces as she lay in bed with their two-year-old daughter. Last week the Latin American Congress of Criminologists picked Rio as the site of their 1946 convention.