BRAZIL: Working a Macumba

Cooks and maids of Rio de Janeiro were incensed. Ex-Provisional President José Linhares, they said, was creating unemployment. Before he handed over Guanabara Palace to incoming President Eurico Caspar Dutra last Jan. 31, he had made his colored cook Rosa an assistant postmistress. Then, being without a cook, he put up at the Copacabana Palace Hotel.

The cooks answered with a macumba, a Brazilian form of sorcery much practiced by the poor and ignorant. Black chickens were killed at street intersections in the dark of the moon, crossed chicken bones were mailed to the former President.

Rio taxi drivers, disgruntled by...