Word: murderousness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Renamo, which claims 24,000 followers, is not the only group that Mozambicans fear. Local warlords and bandits armed with Soviet-made AK-47 rifles murder and plunder at will. Some 80% of the nation is torn by mindless violence. Together with the outlaws, the rebels have driven more than 1 million people from their homes and halted food production by an estimated 2 million farmers. Once uprooted, the farmers are reluctant to plant again. Many refugees build smaller huts than their last ones, out of fear that the rebels will return and destroy their new abodes...
...assaulted each other in San Jose last week, the Costa Rican capital was also the site of a landmark case being tried by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. On trial is the government of Honduras, which has been charged with "integral responsibility" in the disappearance and presumed murder of an unspecified number of its citizens by army death squads. Though the evidence presented at the proceedings deals specifically with the disappearance of four people in the early 1980s, no individuals are on trial; rather, the court is attempting to determine if there is a pattern of murderous conduct...
...general's reaction dismayed White House officials. Blandon drew up his plan last fall after mass protests swept Panama, prompted by charges that implicated Noriega in murder, drug smuggling and election fraud. According to Gabriel Lewis, Panama's former U.S. Ambassador, Noriega had asked Blandon for a blueprint that would let him retire without facing U.S. reprisals. Lewis arranged an October meeting between Blandon and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who stressed Washington's desire for democracy in Panama...
...other end of the scale of seriousness are two works notable for their sheer larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting...
...dissection of Britain's unjust social-class system. The rueful, candid voice he gives to the fleshy prince rings true, the details of the horse-racing and music-hall worlds are vivid, and much of the tale is sweetly funny -- as when His Royal Highness, disguised to investigate a murder, is accosted by a streetwalker who addresses him amiably as "Tubby...