Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...capital punishment, and no matter how serious the offense, a convict never serves more than 30 years. Some of Rio's cops think that the coddling of criminals has gone so far as to become unendurable. Taking the law into their own hands, they have formed small, clandestine death squads, and now execute any criminal who they think has cheated...
Last year nearly 200 criminals were found dead in and around Rio, and the death rate shows no sign of slackening so far this year. In the last two weeks, nine new murders of hoodlums were in the local news. The details of their deaths were grimly familiar. Found on lonely roads outside the city, some of the victims had their arms tied behind their backs. The bodies of at least two were marked with cigar burns. Two more had nylon ropes looped around their necks. One man had been shot five times in the mouth, another three times...
...Rose. In official statements, Rio police have frequently and vociferously denied that they have anything to do with the killings; they claim that warring gangs are to blame. Last week, however, a TIME correspondent reported that several lower-and middle-echelon police officers have admitted to him that death squads are indeed manned by off-duty cops. They claim that the majority of hoodlum killings are disguised gangland slayings, but they concede that many are summary police executions. According to one informant, who was a charter member, the first squad was organized in 1958. It was a tightly knit group...
...been replaced by less tightly organized groups that have sprung up spontaneously in different police districts. According to one police captain, victims are usually murderers, armed robbers, dope peddlers or auto thieves. A man is generally marked for death on the basis of his record and the likelihood that he will escape just punishment in the courts. Once condemned, he is picked up, sometimes as he leaves a police station after being released for lack of evidence. Usually he is taken to a remote jail, where he is held under a false name for a week in case his disappearance...
...from seeing a .45 bullet in a riddled body, blood bursting from the wound like a red rose from the earth.") As a result of all the violence, the Rio gangsters have not surprisingly begun to fight back. They have already executed several cops in direct imitation of the death-squad style...