BRAZIL: The nervous citizens of São Paulo have responded to a new wave of gang violence by locking themselves in their homes, writes Tom Hennigan
At one stage the daily death toll topped that of Baghdad. When São Paulo's biggest criminal organisation launched an all-out attack on the state police, even local residents, inured to levels of violence most other societies would find unacceptable, were shocked.
All last weekend reports flooded in of machine gun and grenade attacks on police stations and assassinations of off-duty policemen, while television broadcast pictures of hooded prisoners holding guards at knifepoint as a so-called "mega-rebellion" gripped the penal system.
By last Monday the gang responsible - the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command), but known to everyone in Brazil as the PCC - had switched to attacking the public bus fleet of the world's third biggest metropolis. After over 60 buses were burned out many operators pulled their fleet and the result was chaos.
What followed was an outbreak of general fear and panic among the city's population. Shops closed, businesses sent workers home early and parents rushed to get their children out of school.
Wild rumours spread of phantom attacks on the underground system and bomb scares at the city airport. Everywhere people insisted a curfew was about to come into force, despite police and government officials insisting on radio that they had no such plans. By Monday night the city was eerily quiet.
But among some ex-pats the question was whether the locals had taken leave of their senses. The violence was shocking and worrying, but placed in context did not seem sufficient cause for residents to abandon their daily routine and lock themselves in their homes.
Most of the attacks were on police buildings. The majority took place in poorer neighbourhoods already viewed by the rest of the population as violent places to be avoided if possible. Here residents had a real reason to fear the worst. But many of the neighbourhoods that were gripped by panic on Monday are far from these areas.
Most of the dead were police or gang members. Civilian deaths directly linked to the disturbances total four. One killing is one too many, but within the context of São Paulo state's population of 40 million it hardly signals cause for mass panic among the wider population, especially one which has lived with high rates of violent crime for decades.
So why no show of defiance against a criminal gang that dares think it could cow a government and its citizens? Perhaps it has to do with the lack of trust in and respect for the forces of order in Brazil. The country's police have a credibility problem.
Despite recent improvements, especially in São Paulo, they still have an often deserved image as inefficient, corrupt and frequently violent.
When the police say they have a situation under control Brazilians are by habit less likely to respond in the same way that Londoners did to the lead of Met chief Sir Ian Blair after last July's suicide bombings. There was widespread sympathy for individual police officers killed but the general retreat into private homes last Monday night was a telling indicator of public confidence in the authorities' capacity to manage the situation.
The retreat home was also a commentary on the politicians who took to the airwaves to insist they would break the power of the gang, before quickly settling into political point-scoring among themselves.
Rumours that state officials had negotiated a truce with gang leaders also undermined confidence, given that most people believe it was official mishandling of public security that spawned the PCC in the first place. Justice in Brazil is slow when it works at all.
Most experts in public security agree that the lack of policing and legal deterrents are a more likely cause of Brazil's high crime rates than poverty and inequality, as suggested by President Lula.
His own government has shown little or no interest in public security. Instead both the São Paulo state government and the federal one in Brasília have seemed content to tackle crime by locking up as many criminals as possible (with around half those inside today still waiting for a sentence).
Rather than invest money in the new jails such a policy requires, governments seem content to go for the low cost solution of allowing prisoners self-manage overcrowded and understaffed jails, creating the conditions in which the PCC was born.
The abject failure of that policy became clear last week and its actual cost was far higher than anyone realised.