BRAZIL: In May Brazil's police killed scores, if not hundreds, of innocent civilians in response to criminal attacks, writes Tom Hennigan in São Paulo.
Police in the Brazilian state of São Paulo summarily executed scores, possibly hundreds, of people in May of this year as part of their response to a wave of attacks by a criminal network against the state.
This will be the conclusion of an independent commission due to report next month on its investigation into the violence that rocked South America's biggest city between May 12th and 20th.
The violence erupted when a prison gang known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC) attacked off-duty police officers and police stations in retaliation for the transfer of its jailed leaders to maximum security prisons. With more than 40 police and prison officers dead and the population close to panic, the police went on the counter-attack, quickly claiming that they had killed more than 100 "suspects" in shoot-outs.
The commission will say the evidence shows many of these deaths were summary killings of people with no link to organised crime, apparently selected because they had previous police records or because they were residents of neighbourhoods long subjected to police violence.
The commission is also investigating more than 80 killings by death squads during the same period. Death squads in Brazil are traditionally linked to police officers, and eyewitnesses to death-squad-style killings in May have provided evidence of their operating in collusion with uniformed police. The police are also the principle suspects in the disappearance of several youths, in a sinister echo of the state's policy of "disappearing" opponents in the 1960s and 1970s.
"What we are dealing with here is the biggest police massacre in the history of Brazil," says Ariel de Castro Alves of the National Movement for Human Rights and a member of the commission. Until now, Brazil's biggest massacre was in 1992 when police killed 111 prisoners while putting down a rebellion in São Paulo's Carandiru jail.
The commission, made up of human rights groups as well as the state's public prosecution and public defender services, is still trying to identify the actual numbers of victims of police violence. Hundreds of deaths during the period are part of the investigation.
As well as trying to ascertain how many people were murdered by police in May's violence, the commission is trying to discover whether the massacre was officially sanctioned by the state's civilian and police leadership.
"At the very least, there was a failure of control by security chiefs because, by any measure, the police reacted to the PCC's attacks in a wild manner," says Mr de Castro Alves. "So now we have to find out was there a lack of control by the state's security leadership or was an order, a licence to kill, given by those in charge." São Paulo's government rejects the idea there was anything untoward in the police's behaviour, saying "apparently, there were no excesses" and the police response "was proportional to the aggression inflicted on the security forces".
But members of the opposition in the state assembly are adamant there were excesses and that they were officially sanctioned.
"All the facts point to the fact there was a massacre in São Paulo, the like of which has never been seen before in Brazil and I believe there was an authorisation to kill," says Vanderlei Siraque, opposition deputy and vice-president of the state legislature's commission on security.
"In many of these confrontations, the police used legitimate force against bandits. But when police capture bandits, they have a duty to process them not execute them, and I believe they were given the liberty to kill captured bandits and, worst of all, ended up killing many innocents as well."
But other observers of São Paulo's police say, far from the leadership giving a green light to the rank and file, the latter's violent response to the PCC's attacks was in part a protest against the leadership, who told local media that they had known in advance about the attacks. This admission infuriated the rank and file to whom this information was not passed and who bore the full force of the gang's offensive.
"The reaction of the police was spontaneous and beyond the control of the civilian and police leadership. No one gave the order to kill, but no one had the courage to try and control what was happening," says Guaracy Mingardi, a criminologist and former São Paulo police officer.
More agreement exists on why the police's retaliation against the PCC's attacks ended up killing so many innocent people instead of targeting actual PCC members. "Our police force treats all poor people as criminals. There exists a criminalisation of poverty in Brazil," says Mr de Castro Alves.
Most of the police's victims were young men of African descent from poor neighbourhoods with drug and crime problems, which have been victim to previous campaigns of "social cleansing" by police and death squads. Witnesses speak of police combing through these neighbourhoods on the nights in question, searching for youths with prison tattoos and demanding to know if they had police records.
In the case of many of the death-squad-style killings, there was not even an attempt to identify people with criminal records.
"The police in Brazil abuse the right to be violent and their profile of a criminal is the 3Ps - pobre, preto, periferia - poor, black and from the periphery [ the outlying slum areas that ring São Paulo]," says Mr Mingardi.
Dalmo Dallari, of Brazil's Council for the Defence of the Human Person, adds: "It's never a scandal when the police kill an innocent youth from the slums because this is considered the price that has to be paid to guarantee the security of the well-off."