RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil is not for beginners. That was a line of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the musician who was the father of the bossa nova movement, wrote "The Girl from Ipanema" and knew that the languorous sensuality of his country that he captured in that song was only one aspect of the story. Another has been on lurid display of late with the killing of more than two dozen people, including seven incinerated on a bus, since violence led by drug gangs erupted in Rio on Dec. 28. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva marked the beginning of his second term this month by calling the slaughter "terrorism." [continues 927 words]
A Religion In Brazil Mixes Catholicism With Powerful Hallucinogens. Alex Bellos Joined The Congregation Ceu do Mapia is probably the smallest community in the world with its own time zone - half an hour in front of Boca do Acre and half an hour behind Pauini, the two nearest towns in this remote and underpopulated corner of the western Brazilian Amazon. The village of roughly 500 people is unique for another reason, too - it is the nucleus of a Catholic sect based on the regular consumption of the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca. [continues 1000 words]
A Prison Gang Shows Its Deadly Power and Flatfoots The Politicians RIO DE JANEIRO is more beautiful, but residents of Sao Paulo boast that their city is safer. At least they did until May 12th, when a wave of violence orchestrated from within the prison system struck Brazil's biggest city and several neighbouring towns. In five days of mayhem and retribution some 150 people, a quarter of them policemen, were killed; 82 buses were torched and 17 bank branches attacked. Rebellions erupted at 74 of the 140 prisons in Sao Paulo state. Schools, shopping centres and offices shut down; transport froze. For several days, paulistanos could not even claim that their city was safer than Baghdad. [continues 852 words]
SO PAULO, Brazil -- Police launched a counterattack Tuesday against gangs rampaging through South America's largest city. At least 33 suspects were killed; police reported one death of their own after dozens of law officers were killed in the preceding days. The violence erupted Friday night when authorities transferred eight leaders of a drug gang to a maximum-security prison to isolate them. Gang members attacked police stations, courts, city buses and other symbols of government. Prison inmates rioted. At least 133 people, including 40 police officers and prison guards, have been killed since Friday night. [continues 192 words]
An unprecedented wave of attacks by a notorious drug gang in South America's largest city, Sao Paulo, entered into its fourth day on Monday, with reports of at least 20 more killings that raised the death toll to more than 70. Masked gang members, apparently enraged at the prison transfer of leaders, hurled grenades at police stations and sprayed them with automatic weapons over the weekend, then turned their rage on the city's buses on Sunday night and on Monday, torching dozens and stranding thousands of commuters. [continues 733 words]
The PCC Reached Out From Sao Paulo Prisons To Attack Police, Buses, And Banks RIO DE JANEIRO - The unprecedented series of attacks on law enforcement that has left as many as 74 people dead and more than 40 prisons under the control of rioting inmates marks the dramatic resurgence of a criminal gang in Sao Paulo. It also signals a new power struggle between police and organized crime in Brazil's biggest state, warn analysts and human rights experts. The weekend attacks were carried out by the First Capital Command (PCC), a gang formed in the 1990s in Sao Paulo's notorious prison system to demand better conditions. But the PCC's audacious and ongoing attacks beyond the prison walls show they have the means to confront the state, says Renato Simoes, a human rights expert who has followed the rise of the group. [continues 757 words]
Attacks Ordered By Imprisoned Leaders Of Gang Are Called 'Direct Attack' On State SAO PAOLO, Brazil // Four days of violence in Brazil's financial capital has killed more than 80 people, including 39 law enforcement officers, who were victims of an underworld run by prisoners able to use cell phones to order killings, drug deals and violent unrest in prisons and on city streets. Authorities called the attacks an unprecedented assault on public security in Latin America's largest country. One top official labeled it the first terrorist strike on Brazil. [continues 580 words]
Death Of Gang Leader Fails To Stop Battle For Control Of Rocinha RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Since the day in October when police killed the head of the Friends of Friends gang, the residents of Rocinha, South America's largest slum, worried about when the struggle for power would begin. Two weeks ago, they got their answer. More than three dozen members of a rival gang, Comando Vermelho, or Red Commando, swept into the streets at the upper reaches of Rocinha's hillside sprawl. Hurling grenades and firing automatic weapons, they blew up power transformers, cutting off electricity and shutting down traffic lights in the middle of the evening rush hour. [continues 535 words]
Battle Over Drug Turf In Rio De Janeiro Slum Shows Lack Of Security RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Since police killed the head of the Friends of Friends gang in October, the residents of South America's largest slum worried about when the struggle for power would begin. Two weeks ago, they got their answer. More than three dozen members of a rival gang, Comando Vermelho, or Red Commando, swept into the streets at the upper reaches of Rocinha's hillside sprawl. Hurling grenades and firing automatic weapons, they blew up power transformers, cutting off electricity and shutting down traffic lights in the middle of the evening rush hour. [continues 744 words]
VICOSA, BRAZIL - Here's a thought for today: BANG! You've been shot. Shot through the heart. Can you imagine it? Your body is warm as blood pours from it, but you feel so cold. There are screams. Someone tries to lift you, but all you feel is your last breath leaving like air from a punctured tire. Your eyes roll back. All goes black. And that's it. You're dead. Such a waste. The bullet wasn't even meant for you. Or maybe it was. It doesn't really matter. Such are the streets of Brazil, a place that gives perspective to gun problems in the Toronto and Hamilton regions. [continues 644 words]
Ms. Maggessi Wins Acclaim As She Takes on Brazil's Drug Bosses RIO DE JANEIRO -- Once every few months, the sky above this city's sprawling Rocinha slum is lit by phosphorescent red trails of crisscrossing bullets. Residents know that yet another battle has erupted between cops and local drug lords. As Brazil's best-known city continues its decades-long war on drugs, Rio police are having a harder time arresting drug bosses because the new breed of bosses operate among the densely packed residents of the city's 500 slums, home to nearly one of every five of Rio's six million people. Police raids often produce bystander casualties. [continues 758 words]
More Than 4,000 Have Died at Hands of Police in Violent Cycle RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - The pop-pop-pop of firecrackers filled the air. But this was no party. To warn drug dealers of a police sweep, youngsters employed as lookouts in this sprawling Rio de Janeiro slum lit string after string of fireworks. Moments later, five officers waving automatic rifles charged down the crowded main street. As they ducked for cover, fruit vendors and taxi drivers seemed more spooked by the cops than the criminals. [continues 1668 words]
The sweltering heat inside the Capital Female Penitentiary got hotter - - contestants to the Miss Penitentiary pageant were working overtime using hair dyers. Angelica Mazua, a statuesque Angolan facing international drug smuggling charges, was voted Miss Penitentiary 2005 on Thursday after a six-hour contest pitting 40 female inmates from 10 prisons around Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo. "People told me, 'You're tall. You should enter the contest,' so that's why I entered," said Mazua, who has been jailed for four months and could be sentenced to about five years behind bars if she's convicted. "I've always been interested in fashion." [continues 126 words]
Brazilian Officials Say A Bus Blaze That Killed Five People Was A Retaliatory Assault By Suspected Drug Traffickers. Some Fear More Violence. RIO DE JANEIRO - A deadly arson attack this week on a bus full of passengers has shocked residents of a city already accustomed to rampant crime and raised fears of a surge in violence on the cusp of the busy tourist season. Five people were killed and several others hurt after a gang of suspected drug traffickers flagged down a bus, doused the interior and those aboard with gasoline and set everything ablaze. Among the dead were an infant and her mother, whose charred body was discovered atop her daughter, an apparent attempt to shield her baby from the flames. [continues 679 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil's anti-narcotics police, or Denarc, said Saturday it arrested Paraguayan Ernesto Pablo Villalba, considered a top marijuana trafficker. Villalba was arrested Friday in Foz do Iguacu, a city on the Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina border where his base of operations was located, and was transferred Saturday to a prison in Sao Paulo. According to authorities, the drug kingpin's organization smuggled an average of 20 tons of marijuana per month from Paraguay. The gang transported the drug, hidden inside trucks, through various towns of the southern Brazilian state of Parana to Sao Paulo, from where it was distributed to the rest of the country. Three other Brazilian traffickers were also arrested in the police operation, which had been planned over the past six months and was known as Operation Foz. "Operation Foz was a success, since we dismantled the gang," Denarc director Emilio Francolin told reporters Saturday. [end]
Rio Woman Films Drug Use, Sales In Favela RIO DE JANEIRO The neighbors have their doubts about the woman called Dona Vitoria, but no one disputes that the drug trade thrived in their neighborhood or in this city where she has become a hero. Dona Vitoria is the pseudonym given to a Rio woman who, fed up by what she says was the lack of response by police, videotaped from her apartment window a stream of drug sales on the hills outside her home. She gave the tapes to a local reporter, and the publication of photos from them won Dona Vitoria recognition, relocation and, with good reason, witness protection. [continues 528 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO -- The neighbors have their doubts about the woman called Dona Vitoria, but no one disputes that the drug trade thrives in their neighborhood or in this city where she has become a hero. Dona Vitoria is the pseudonym given to a Rio woman who, fed up by what she says was the lack of response by police, videotaped from her apartment window a stream of drug sales on the hills outside her home. She gave the tapes to a local reporter, and the publication of photos from them won for Dona Vitoria recognition, relocation and, with good reason, witness protection. [continues 660 words]
Soccer legend Pele wept when he visited his son, who is in police custody in Brazil on suspicion of drug trafficking, and said he regretted he had failed to see Edinho was using narcotics. Edson Cholbi Nascimento, 34, known as Edinho, was arrested on Monday along with 51 others in the port city of Santos. He was being held at the anti-narcotics police headquarters in the state capital, Sao Paulo. In a letter released by his lawyer, Edinho, a former goalkeeper for Santos soccer club, said he was dependent on marijuana but denied being involved with drug traffickers. [continues 177 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO - (AP) -- Federal police opened fire on a twin-engine plane suspected of carrying drugs as it attempted to take off from an airfield in southern Brazil, killing the pilot, officials said Monday. Police first tried to seize the aircraft, but the pilot tried to take off anyway, endangering the lives of officers in another airplane, authorities said. Police fired at the plane, killing the 65-year-old pilot. A 50-year-old man who was aboard the plane was arrested. [continues 126 words]
Rio's drug gang leaders have been buying light weapons easy for children to carry: Similarities to use of children in African wars Long concerned with the plight of child soldiers in Africa, Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire (Ret.) has recently made a new discovery -- that drug traffickers in Brazil are increasingly recruiting children to the drug wars. Gen. Dallaire, who was the commander of the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping mission during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, sees the proof of this in a recent massacre in Rio de Janeiro, where nine adolescents were among the 30 victims. [continues 797 words]
Inside Brazil
