Tune in to your local Spanish-language television station and see a woman who cries tears of glass to demonstrate God's glory, or a mother who, to earn money to feed her family, dances with a boa constrictor. Flick to the competing Spanish channel and observe voluptuous women in string bikinis on Rio de Janeiro's beaches, or hear the story of the boy who castrated a pig with his teeth. Stick around: the following segment could be an update of the U.S. mission to Somalia, or Bill Clinton's next political Gordian knot.

Univision and Telemundo, which together reach about 90 percent of the Spanish-speaking households in the U.S. through more than 800 stations, have concocted a new version of tabloid journalism: Hard Copy meets CNN's Headline News, plus salsa -- Latin America's magic realism meets the news camera. The shows, which started a little more than two years ago, mix news, consumer information, virgin apparitions, and teenage suicide pacts. Univision's Noticias y Mas (News and More) and Telemundo's Ocurrio Asi (It Happened This Way) are among the most popular programs on Spanish-language television -- so popular among the 24 million U.S. Hispanics that they recently expanded from thirty minutes to a full hour. In Latin America, they are aired in nearly every country.

As news shows, they are earning recognition. At the regional Emmy ceremony in Miami last year, Ocurrio Asi walked off with four awards. Noticias y Mas won three, including one for outstanding investigative reporting, for a story about an ultraconservative branch of the Catholic church accused of "brainwashing" Spanish girls into becoming nuns.

But the programs also face sharp criticism. It was during a filming of a story for Ocurrio Asi last January that a man shot and killed his ex-wife before a running Telemundo camera. Producers had planned a story about a man in mourning after his teenage daughter's suicide. As a crew filmed him placing flowers on the daughter's grave, his former wife, whom he blamed for the suicide, arrived unexpectedly. While Telemundo's reporter was pressing the nervous woman to talk about the daughter's suicide, the father shoved the reporter aside and began shooting. Some viewers were shocked that the network chose to show the entire episode.

That same week, Univision's Noticias y Mas aired a slapdash story about a visit by the president of Guatemala to a topless nightclub in New York City. After the story provoked headlines all over Guatemala, it became clear that president Jorge Serrano Elias had been in the restaurant part of the establishment, not the go-go section, with his two sons, his defense minister, and various U.N. delegates. The network apologized for the segment's "tone."

Univision's Noticias y Mas was conceived by Guillermo Martinez, who heads the network's news department, to look much like a local news show, complete with sports and weather reports. Advertising for the show, however, puts the emphasis in Noticias y Mas on the Mas, or more. In a popular Spanish-language magazine, a glossy ad for the newscast shows a smug-looking journalist sitting in a steaming cauldron, videocamera in hand, while in the background a skull hangs from a branch. The copy reads: "Everything is possible on Noticias y Mas."

Telemundo, for its part, hired Fran Mires, a former producer of a now-defunct U.S. tabloid show, Inside Report. "I didn't speak Spanish, but I had the perfect training for these sensational news magazines," she says. Mires started Ocurrio Asi in October 1990 with a segment about a girl who was kidnapped, raped, and mutilated in Texas. She won a regional Emmy for it.

Mixing news and horror is not new in Latin America, where many leading dailies dedicate extensive space to the coverage of violent crimes and accidents, usually accompanied by a bloody photograph. Martinez freely admits that Noticias y Mas includes gore. "But, he adds, "there are a lot of soft touches." A recent segment of his show profiled a blind professor who built a school in a hamlet in the Colombian desert.

Mires does such stories on Ocurrio Asi, too. She recently did a piece about a blind child, also in Colombia, who bicycles around telling neighbors they have calls at the public telephone booth. "If I took this story to American producers," says Mires, "they'd say, 'Get out of here. It's too nice, not sexy. There is no shock value.'"

To add sex appeal to its own mix, Mires hired a Chilean former Miss Universe to present the entertainment news. She recently interviewed Geraldo Rivera, in Spanish.

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