Inmates Unleash a Torrent of Violence on Brazilian City

A four-day spree of violence in Brazil’s financial capital has killed more than 80 people, including 39 law enforcement officers, victims of an underworld run by inmates able to use cellphones to order killings, drug deals and violent unrest in prison and on city streets.

Authorities called the attacks an unprecedented assault against public security in Latin America’s largest nation. Sao Paulo’s chief public prosecutor, Janice Ascari, labeled them the first terrorist attacks on Brazilian soil.

At least 180 acts of violence against police and fire stations, public buses, banks and other targets have been reported since the disturbances erupted Friday. Uprisings were reported at 80 prisons.

As of late Monday, officials confirmed 81 dead and 49 wounded and said 91 suspects had been apprehended. Law enforcement officials promised swift action to restore order in the world’s third-largest city, with a population of 20 million.

“We are not going to give in to organized crime,” Sao Paulo Gov. Claudio Lembo told reporters.

Bloody jail uprisings are common in Brazil, but the current spate of violence looks more like a guerrilla offensive with multiple fronts in a war between the state and a powerful prison-based gang. The weekend death toll in Sao Paulo exceeded that in Baghdad.

“It’s a direct attack against the state, against public order,” said Elisabete Albernaz, a specialist in public safety at Viva Rio, a research institute in Rio de Janeiro.

“This is a show of power, using terror and panic to destabilize the normal order.”

On a day when Brazil’s World Cup soccer squad was unveiled, talk of the violence trumped sports chat around the country -- a rarity in the soccer-crazed nation.

Instead of sports, fear gripped this normally pulsating city, where 3 million commuters were stranded or delayed after gang members boarded dozens of buses, ordered passengers out and torched the vehicles. Many schools and shops were closed, and heavily armed police set up roadblocks and guarded police stations throughout the city.

“I’m afraid to take the subway -- it’s a very easy target,” said Bianca Vaz Mondo, 21, a student at the University of Sao Paulo.

Authorities blame the violence on First Command of the Capital, a prison-based gang known by its Portuguese initials, PCC. The group was apparently angry about the transfer of hundreds of gang members, including its leader, to a remote penitentiary.

Officials use transfers to dilute the power of imprisoned gang leaders, who wield extraordinary influence even behind bars. From inside prison walls they can order drug deals, kidnappings, bank robberies, massacres and, in this case, something close to all-out rebellion.

“The leaders communicate through [smuggled] cellphones,” said Karyna Sposato, who works with a United Nations group on crime prevention in Sao Paulo. “They use cellphones for the organization of criminal acts.”

Other conduits to the outside world, officials say, are lawyers and prison visitors -- mostly the spouses, partners and mothers of the imprisoned.

The coordinated uprisings in Sao Paulo sparked corresponding riots at 10 prisons in the neighboring states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Parana, officials said.

From jail, law enforcement authorities say, the PCC controls a major chunk of the narcotics traffic in Sao Paulo, which is a center for the domestic drug market and for the transshipment of cocaine to Europe.

Corruption among police and prison guards, combined with deep resentment against brutality by authorities, helps spur violence in Brazil’s overcrowded jails, which have nearly 350,000 prisoners.

The most notorious incident was a police assault on rioting prisoners at the infamous Carandiru facility in 1992, which left 111 inmates dead and a vivid image of the troubles in the prisons.

“What is happening now represents the story of the prison system itself -- it is motivated by the day-to-day hate and anger that the prisoner experiences from being humiliated,” said Alvaro Augusto de Sa, a law professor who once worked as a psychologist in the prisons.

The PCC gang was formed more than a decade ago, after the massacre at Carandiru. That prison, which has since been torn down, was the subject of a 2003 film by Hector Babenco, the director of “Pixote” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

The PCC made headlines in 2001, when the group’s then-leader, Idemir Carlos Ambrosio, known as the Shadow, coordinated simultaneous rebellions in 29 prisons, leaving 16 people dead. Ambrosio was killed in prison five months later.

The current PCC boss, authorities say, is a charismatic ex-pickpocket, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, widely known in Brazil as Marcola and called Playboy in prison, where he is serving a sentence of more than 40 years for bank robbery. Herbas was apparently among the hundreds of prisoners recently transferred in the move that triggered the current attacks.

In addition to 39 police officers or prison guards, the dead included 38 suspects and four civilians, authorities said, and inmates were holding more than 120 hostages, including guards and civilians. At one point they held nearly 400.

Since the offensive began Friday, assailants with pistols, automatic rifles, grenades, Molotov cocktails and other weapons had attacked an array of targets, including patrol cars, police and fire stations, banks, a courthouse and bars where off-duty officers gather.

“There’s a lot of fear in Sao Paulo -- it’s an attack on the police who are supposed to defend the people, who are supposed to provide security in society,” De Sa said.

The attacks appeared to migrate from poorer neighborhoods to upscale districts such as Vila Olimpia and Higienopolis, fanning residents’ fears amid rumors of more attacks.

Police denied reports that a curfew was planned for sundown Monday, but traffic was jammed earlier than usual as workers left their jobs and headed home.

Special correspondent Soares reported from Sao Paulo, and Times staff writers McDonnell and Andres D’Alessandro reported from Buenos Aires. Special correspondent Suzy Khimm in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.