Hundreds of prisoners have escaped from four semi-open prisons in Brazil’s southeastern Sao Paulo state after Easter prison holidays were canceled and restrictions on visitors tightened because of COVID-19.
Videos showed dozens of prisoners fleeing down a street near one coastal prison and flooding across a soccer pitch on a beach.
There were riots and escapes from semi-open prisons in Tremembe, Porto Feliz and a wing of a prison in Mirandopolis in Sao Paulo.
In one video, hordes of prisoners could be seen running away in Mongagua on the Sao Paulo coast — where 400 reportedly fled — while a man shouts: “Come back Monday, OK?”
Other videos showed dozens on a beach.
News Web site G1 reported that 40 prisoners had been recaptured.
The Sao Paulo state penitentiary department said that it had postponed the Easter prison break — one of five annual breaks for prisoners in semi-open regimes who work in the day — because of the coronavirus.
“The measure was necessary because the benefit would include more than 34,000 convicts of the semi-open regime who, returning to prison, would have high potential to install and propagate coronavirus,” the department said in a statement, adding that semi-open prisons do not have armed guards.
Police and prison officer riot teams recovered control over the four prisons and recaptured 174 prisoners, it later said.
Human rights news Web site Ponte estimated that as many as 1,500 prisoners had escaped.
“These prisoners were unhappy about the decision that suspended the Easter leave,” said Lincoln Gakiya, a prosecutor in Sao Paulo and a specialist in drug gangs. “The prisoners were told and in some units, rebelled.”
The rebellions echoed the situation in Italy’s crowded prisons, where 10 have died in riots following restrictions on visits from family members.
Other security specialists said that anger over the treatment of leaders of Brazil’s biggest drug gang, the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command, was also a factor.
Some prisoners have complained over the treatment of the gang’s leaders, refusing to go to hearings in what is called a “white strike,” Brazilian Public Security Forum director president Renato Lima said.
Eight guards were taken hostage in Mongagua and there would have been many more if the state did not have a centrally controlled locking system, Lima said.
Gruesomely violent prison riots and breakouts are common in Brazil’s overcrowded prisons, many of which are controlled by drug gangs — 57 people were killed last year in just one rebellion in Altamira in the Amazon.
However, COVID-19 poses a new threat, Lima said.
In 2017, one-third of Brazil’s prisoners, 234,000 people, did not have a health station in their prisons and nearly 9,000 prisoners were older than 60.
“It’s a time bomb,” Lima said.
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