Gang attacks leave 81 dead in Brazil

Heavily-armed police guarded the deserted streets of South America’s largest city in Brazil through the night, after four days of unprecedented gang attacks that left 81 people dead.

“We’re at war with them. There will be more casualties, but we won’t back down,” state military police chief Col. Elizeu Teixeira Borges said of the gangs that launched a spree of attacks on police stations, bars and banks in response to the prison transfers of their leaders.

Near hastily-shuttered businesses in a blue-collar neighbourhood of Sau Paulo last night, a dozen officers with shotguns and pistols said they did not fear overnight gang attacks that already killed dozens of their fellow police and prompted businesses to send workers home by 4pm.

“Everything’s closing up, but we’ll be here waiting,” said a grim Officer Edvan Oliveira, his finger resting on the trigger of his shotgun. “We want them to come.”

Twenty-one new killings were reported yesterday, the state government of Sao Paulo said, putting the death toll at 81 in the spree: 39 police officers and prison guards, 38 suspected gang members and four civilians caught in 184 attacks since Friday.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva offered to send 4,000 elite troops to restore order, but Sao Paulo state Governor Claudio Lembo insisted the help wasn’t needed – even as the chaos prompted the stock market to cancel late trading and a city that never sleeps was eerily quiet at the start of the work week in Brazil’s financial and industrial heart.

“We are in control of the city and we will preserve this control,” Lembo declared. “At this moment the army is unnecessary.”

By late last night, all 73 prison rebellions that broke out had been quelled and police pointed to a grim figure to push their claim that the situation would soon come back to something like normal.

Mostly police officers and prison guards were killed on Friday and Saturday nights – but the tally of dead in overnight violence from Sunday to Monday was almost exclusively suspected gang members killed in shoot-outs with police.

Silva called the violence “a provocation, a show of force by organised crime,” adding that the gangs' “tentacles are spread around the world and we must use a lot of intelligence” to quell the chaos their attacks caused.

The violence was triggered last Thursday by an attempt to isolate leaders of the First Capital Command gang, who control drug trafficking and many of Sao Paulo’s teeming, notoriously corrupt prisons, by transferring eight of them last week to a high-security facility in a remote part of Sao Paulo state. Leaders of the gang, known there as the PCC, reportedly used mobile phones the next day to order the attacks.

Officials were worried the violence could spread to Rio de Janeiro, where 40,000 police were put on high alert and extra patrols were dispatched to slums where drug gang leaders live, said police spokeswoman Thais Nunes. There were also sporadic reports of violence in other cities in Sao Paulo state, including the killing of a prison guard with 20 shots to the head, Globo TV reported.

In Sao Paulo, television images showed police forcing people from their cars at gunpoint in random checks. Parents pulled their children from schools in droves, and didn’t know whether they would send them back today. Businesses that normally stay open until midnight or later were closed before sunset.

Police in Sao Paulo said at least 91 people had been arrested since Friday night, when gang members began riddling police cars with bullets, hurling grenades at police stations and attacking officers in their homes and after-work hangouts.

Starting on Sunday night, the gang employed a new tactic: sending gunmen onto buses, ordering passengers and drivers off and torching the vehicles. There was no mention of injuries in the dozens of bus burnings, which continued in broad daylight yesterday.

Thousands of terrified bus drivers refused to work, leaving an estimated 2.9 million people scrambling to find a way to their jobs.

The violence also weighed in on financial markets, with stocks plunging more than 2% as a perception took hold that Brazil is more risky than previously thought contributed to the losses. The country’s currency, the real, also fell 2% against the US dollar.

The PCC was founded in 1993 in Sao Paulo’s Taubate Penitentiary and became involved in drug and arms trafficking, kidnappings, bank robberies and extortion.

It staged a massive prison uprising in 2001 in which 19 inmates died, and attacked more than 50 police stations in November 2003. Three officers and two suspected gang members were killed and 12 people injured in those attacks.