Sao Paulo – Sao Paulo authorities on Tuesday reduced from 110 to 79 the number of alleged criminal gang members who died last week in the police retaliation for the wave of violence unleashed by the First Capital Command, or PCC, gang.
Until Tuesday, authorities had said that a total of 154 people had died in the gun battles and other violence between police and gang members. Of those, 41 were police officers, 4 were civilians and 109 were said to be alleged gang members.
However, the Public Safety Secretariat adjusted those numbers to reflect the fact that 31 of the supposed gangsters who died violently were now thought to have had no connection with the some 300 PCC attacks on police stations, individual officers, buses, banks and other targets beginning May 12 that placed authorities in Brazil’s largest city in check for an entire week.
“At first, those cases were considered to be related to the actions of the PCC. However, investigations have shown that the said cases have no relation to the (PCC) attacks,” said the security authorities in their report on the matter.
The clarification came amid judicial and human rights defenders’ pressure on the authorities to release the identities of the alleged criminals gunned down by the Military Police after numerous complaints that some of them were not linked to the gangs, but rather had been killed by trigger-happy and/or revenge-minded police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of the 31 people killed who evidently were not linked to the gangs, authorities have only been able to identify eight.
After allegations that Brazilian cops summarily executed suspected gang members in reprisal for an offensive by drug-running thugs, the national attorney general’s office gave Sao Paulo police a deadline for handing over the names of the then-109 presumed gangsters gunned down.
The move came as Amnesty International (AI) reported Tuesday recurrent violations of human rights in Brazil, a country where extrajudicial executions, torture and the use of excessive force by police regularly occur.
The Thursday deadline was established for the “investigation of events reported by the press about possible abuses of power committed by the police” as they sought to quell the wave of violence unleashed by members of the PCC prison mafia, according to a statement issued by the AG’s office.
As a reaction to the hundreds of often deadly attacks carried out last week by members of the crime group that left 41 police officers or prison guards dead in Sao Paulo, authorities launched a counteroffensive that, according to initial official statistics, ended with 109 presumed criminals dead and another 125 under arrest.
Non-governmental organizations have been asking since last week that the names of the dead be released due to suspicions that police executed a number of innocent people in the process.
Sao Paulo authorities have refused to publish the list of the dead, their supposed connections with criminal organizations or the results of forensic examinations, despite reports that some innocent people were executed by being shot at point-blank range or with a bullet at the base of the skull.
Faced with an increasing number of complaints, the AG’s office requested that police present the list of criminals killed and to hand over by Saturday a copy of all police reports dealing with the circumstances in which the clashes and the deaths occurred.
It also gave a weekend deadline for the Legal Medicine Institute to hand over copies of the results of all examinations practiced by forensic experts on the victims’ bodies.
Questioned about the decision of the AG’s office, Sao Paulo Governor Claudio Lembo admitted that the death of some innocent person might have occurred “here or there,” but he denied that the police were responsible for a “massacre.”
According to the regional governor, the only massacre was the one suffered by police.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva praised last Sunday the action taken by the Sao Paulo government against the criminal offensive.
“I wish to express here in public my solidarity with Gov. Claudio Lembo for the stand he made. He could not have done more than he did,” the head of state said.
The attacks carried out between May 12-18 by the First Capital Command, a criminal organization that controls several jails, sparked panic in the richest, most heavily populated state in Brazil, practically paralyzing it a week ago Monday.
According to official figures, 154 people died as a result of attacks on police stations, police vehicles, government buildings, buses and banks, and from the ensuing police response. At least 31 of those people are now thought to have been innocent victims of the police retaliation.
The number does not include nine prisoners who died during simultaneous uprisings that took place in 74 Sao Paulo jails by order of the same criminal organization.
The crime offensive was said to be the First Capital Command’s retaliation for moving 765 prisoners, among them the gang’s top leaders, to maximum security prisons the day before.
Over the years, Brazilian police repeatedly have been accused by local and international rights organizations of grossly abusing power, including summary execution of suspected criminals as part of campaigns of “social cleansing.”
Amnesty International said Tuesday in the chapter on Brazil in its yearly report on the world rights situation that “Brazilians, especially the poor and socially excluded, continued to suffer high levels of human rights violations.”
Such violations were generalized throughout the prison system, “where conditions were often cruel, inhuman or degrading,” the document says.
“Impunity for human rights violations was the norm, arising from the slowness of judicial proceedings and the reluctance of some of the judiciary to prosecute such cases,” according to the rights organization.
Between 1999 and 2004 alone there were “more than 9,000 cases of police killings”, predominantly “resistance followed by death”, with scarcely any judicial investigations to discover the circumstances surrounding these incidents.
There were also recurrent reports of murders executed by “death squads” in which active or retired police officers took part, and of police agents implicated in corruption or other criminal activities.
