The Brazilian government is struggling to cope with overcrowded and violent prisons that have seen about 100 inmates killed within a week, with many beheaded and dismembered.
This is one of the most serious crises that Brazilian President Michel Temer has faced since assuming power last year after the impeachment of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
Critics have described the Temer administration’s response as inadequate and called the refusal by all spheres of government to accept responsibility as “absurd.”
Photo: Reuters
“This is a challenge to civilization,” said Jose Moises, a professor of political science at the University of Sao Paulo. “It was not a good response.”
After 56 prisoners were killed in a riot between rival drug gangs that began on Sunday last week at the privately run Anisio Jobim Penitentiary complex in Manaus in Amazonas state, followed by four killed the next day at a nearby jail, it took Temer three days to respond.
He called it a “terrible accident” and said that because a private company ran the prison where the killings happened, the state bore no clear responsibility.
His comments were widely ridiculed.
“The majority saw the president’s declaration as disdainful to the seriousness of the situation,” the Sensationalist, a widely read satirical Web site, said.
“The government treated this tragedy as if it was unforeseen. This is absurd,” said Maria Laura Canineu, director in Brazil of Human Rights Watch.
Canineu pointed to a December 2015 report from the National Mechanism for the Prevention and Combat of Torture, a group of independent researchers linked to the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, that described a potentially explosive situation at the Anisio Jobim prison, where prisoners were scared they could be tortured and killed in a riot.
Adding to the recent carnage, 33 died on Friday last week in a prison riot outside Boa Vista, in Roraima, north of Brazil.
Police officers said two rival drug gangs, the First Capital Command and the Family of the North, are involved in a bloody war for control of lucrative Amazon drug smuggling routes and are behind the grisly murders in recent days.
Murders and robberies have soared in the city of Manaus since the prison killings, said Gerson Feitosa, a police corporal and president of a local police association.
“People are scared,” he said. “After the massacre, the war on the streets has started.”
Brazilian Minister of Justice Alexandre de Moraes released a draft of a National Plan of Public Security on Friday.
First announced in October last year, the proposal aims to reduce homicides, modernize the prison system and improve cooperation between security agencies and neighboring nations in the fight against cross-border organized crime.
It includes building five new federal prisons for 220 dangerous prisoners, US$248 million for states to build new jails and US$94 million for mobile phone blockers, body scanners and ankle bracelets.
Robert Muggah, founder of the Igarape Institute in Rio de Janeiro, which specializes in public security and drug policy, said the plan included welcoming innovations, like a target to reduce homicides 7 percent a year, but it was too focused on law and order.
“The fight against drugs will fail if it’s reduced to eradicating drug production and seizing drugs,” Muggah said.
Drug use and possession should be decriminalized, he said.
Violence has been a problem for decades in Brazil’s overcrowded prisons, where drug gangs rule and decapitations are common.
And memories are still fresh in Brazil of the violence that terrorized Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, in 2006, when fighting between police and the First Capital Command gang killed about 200 people.
In addition to the criticism faced by the Temer administration, the Amazonas state government faces a number of serious accusations.
A report by state prosecutors on Wednesday last week requested that private prison contracts be rescinded because of the “lack of control of security and inefficient management.”
In 2012, 3 percent of Brazilian inmates were in privately run prisons.
Prosecutors said the state government paid Umanizzare, the company running Anisio Jobim prison, about US$1,458 a month for each prisoner, about twice the Brazilian average of US$745 cited by the president of Brazil’s top court, Carmen Lucia, in November last year.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS