Sao Paulo, Brazil – Beginning Thursday, police officers in plainclothes will ride on municipal buses here to help prevent further gang attacks, authorities said.
The decision to place the cops on the buses was made at a meeting of Sao Paulo Mayor Gilberto Kassab and top police officials amid a new violent offensive by organized crime, which has focused its attacks on public buses.
“We’re going to place police on all the bus lines,” said the commander of the Military Police in Sao Paulo state, Col. Elizeu Eclair Teixeira, upon emerging from the meeting with the mayor.
The move came in response to another wave of violence blamed on the First Capital Command (PCC), a prison-based gang that controls drug and weapons trafficking in the slums of Sao Paulo and other cities.
Since Tuesday, at least eight people have been killed in the PCC attacks, and dozens of buses have been burned in Sao Paulo and other cities in the state, the police chief said.
The dead include a Military Police officer and his sister in Sao Paulo, three private security guards in the coastal city of Guaruja, a prison guard in Campinas, a member of the Municipal Guard in Cabreuva and the son of a police detective in Sao Vicente.
Also in Sao Vicente, a 2-year-old boy and a 24-year-old woman were seriously burned when they could not get out of a bus they were riding on before gang attackers set fire to it on Wednesday night.
Col. Teixeira also said that between Tuesday night and Thursday morning there had been 106 attacks by organized criminal gangs statewide and 68 buses had been burned. Forty-five of the attacks occurred here in this megalopolis that is Brazil’s financial and industrial center and did not cause any deaths, unlike assaults the previous night in which six people were killed.
The new attacks come two months after the PCC launched a big offensive – including some 300 attacks on police stations, buses and businesses – that left more than 120 people dead. Among those killed in May were 41 policemen and prison guards, four civilians and 79 people authorities described as suspected gangsters.
Outlining the new steps to protect city buses, Teixeira said that “it’s important to know that the criminal who gets on a bus and orders the passengers off may find himself confronting a policeman,” adding that officers will be sure not to put the passengers at risk in dealing with the attackers.
Kassab said that the police officers guarding the buses will confront the criminals “to the end” because the authorities are resolved to “rigorously confront organized crime.”
The new targeting of buses left an estimated 3 million Sao Paulo residents without public transportation Thursday.
Along with the four bank branches partially burned by fires set by assailants, local radio stations said a gas station, a police cruiser and a post of the Municipal Guard were also set ablaze.
In the town of Juquitiba outside Sao Paulo, a bomb partially destroyed the offices of the city council. In Santana de Parnaiba, attackers burned an ambulance responding to what turned out to be a false alarm.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Wednesday that the gang-spawned violence is “terrorizing” Brazil’s biggest and richest state. He said the offensive may require emergency measures by the federal government, but that local authorities must request help.
“The bandits are provoking the police, provoking civil society, terrorizing, and we are ready to do what the law allows us to do, but we need an agreement with the Sao Paulo authorities,” Lula said.
The attacks came just hours after authorities announced the arrest of Emivaldo Silva Santos, a reputed PCC kingpin in the industrial zone known as ABC Paulista.
Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos has come to Sao Paulo to meet with state Gov. Claudio Lembo to offer help from Brasilia on the security front.
Even so, Lembo said in advance of the meeting that the state did not need the assistance and was capable of controlling the violence with its own resources.
