Police Implicated : Squads of Death Stalk Brazil Slums

A neighborhood card game was breaking up after midnight April 8 when eight armed men arrived, some wearing masks or hoods. They tied up the card players with nylon cord, then opened fire on them.

“They kept killing them until they ran out of bullets, then they reloaded and shot some more,” said Nilson Melo, one victim’s brother. “They didn’t leave anyone alive to tell the story.”

Seven men, aged 19 to 35, died. More than 70 shots were fired, Melo said. “No body had fewer than 12 shots.”

Before they left, the killers marked the dead with some of the cards from the playing deck.

“They left a card on each one, all bloody, on top of the body,” Melo said.

Innocents Killed

He and other residents of Morro da Coreia, a hillside slum in Niteroi, blame the killings on off-duty police officers and civilian accomplices. They say similar death squads have been terrorizing the slum, ruthlessly hunting down suspected criminals and killing innocent men in the process.

“The squads are always police,” said Melo, 20, adding that in recent months they have killed a dozen men in Morro da Coreia and nearby neighborhoods.

“Only in Brazil do you have that kind of immorality,” he said in the room where the latest seven were killed. “They come in here and they kill seven defenseless men, kill them in cold blood.”

Bloodshed by death squads has ebbed and flowed for more than two decades in Brazil. In the last two years, their activity has increased in the impoverished suburbs of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil’s two biggest cities, taking hundreds of lives and adding to a climate of savage urban violence.

New Wave in Niteroi

Last year, a wave of killings peaked in the Baixada Fluminense, a sprawling constellation of suburbs north of Rio. And this year, the wave has swept the Niteroi area, east of Rio, across the polluted waters of Guanabara Bay.

These are not political assassinations or gang slayings but rather crime fighting zeal run amok. Brazilian death squads are a drastic answer to epidemic urban crime that flourishes in poverty, largely unchecked by under-funded and ineffective police forces or by crowded and inefficient courts.

No one has compiled statistics on Brazilian death squad killings, but no one doubts that few, if any, countries can match Brazil’s record for this clandestine brand of crude criminal justice. And the “Slaughter of Niteroi,” as the April 8 slayings in Morro da Coreia have been dubbed, is an especially bloody example.

It took place in a small back room of Tereza Melo Silva’s stucco house, on a narrow dirt path on the crowded hillside. The room, with its own door opening onto the path, belonged to Nilton Melo, her 23-year-old son. He often invited friends and neighbors over for low-stakes card games.

Some Left Early

Some players had already gone home when the death squad arrived at about 12:30 a.m. on April 8. The killers had no trouble getting in.

“The door was open--it was hot,” said Nilton’s mother, known as Dona Tereza.

From her room, she heard a commotion, shouts and thumps, she said. “When they fired the first shot, I screamed, ‘They’ve killed my son.’ ”

She heard more shooting, mingled with the victims’ moans. “They moaned with the shots,” she said. Later, she saw the bodies.

“They all died with their mouths open, as if they wanted to say something,” said Dona Tereza, 50.

Rosangela de Souza, Nilton’s 15-year-old girlfriend and the mother of his year-old son, also saw the bodies. She said their hands and feet were bound and many were bruised and cut.

“They beat them badly . . . before they killed them,” De Souza said.

After the police came and the bodies were taken away, De Souza cleaned up the room.

“There was a lot of blood,” she said, pointing out traces that remained on the scarred brick floor. She also pointed out numerous bullet holes in the pastel green walls.

Blames Police

For De Souza, there is no doubt about who the killers were.

“It is certain that it was the police,” she said.

While she spoke, a young man looked in the door.

“They are all police,” the young man, Roberto Menezes, asserted.

Menezes’ 23-year-old brother, Rogerio, was one of the seven victims. Roberto, 21, said none of the seven had a police record or was involved in any criminal activity, but he said they were probably killed because the death squad had expected to find criminals at the card game.

“They come looking for guys,” Menezes said. “When they don’t find those guys in a place, they kill the others. That’s an old story, not just now.”

Police records, however, showed that two of the men killed at the card game had arrest records for trafficking in small amounts of drugs. Charges against one were dismissed in 1981, and the other was sentenced last year to eight months on parole.

Civil police detectives have been interviewing relatives of victims and witnesses to the events of April 8. A key witness is Rosaria dos Santos, the wife of a victim, who said she saw the killings from her nearby home.

In a signed statement, Dos Santos said she saw the faces of two squad members who were standing guard outside. She approached the pair before the shooting started and asked what they were going to do with the card players.

“They said they would all be arrested and that a vehicle was waiting down below,” the statement said.

Dos Santos said she saw that the card players were being beaten and tied up inside the room. Their valuables--chains, watches, money and even sneakers--were put in a grocery bag and taken away. They have not been recovered.

“When they were all being tied with their hands behind them, they were made to kneel down,” she said. Her husband, Alcedir Santos Reis, 23, “begged not to be killed because he had a daughter of 2 months to raise.” Dos Santos said that she shouted from her house and that someone fired an automatic weapon in her direction. Then the killing began.

“Afterward, they (the killers) all came out laughing, heading down toward Santo Cristo Street,” Dos Santos’ statement said.

Refused to Run Errand

A statement by the mother of another victim said that her son, one of those with an arrest record, had refused to run an errand the day before the killings because, he said, police officers were waiting to kill him. The woman, Carmen Aparecida da Silva, said her son named three of the officers by their nicknames--”Jorge da Dorinha,” “Paraiba” and “Nenem.”

The three have been accused of previous death squad killings, and “Jorge da Dorinha” has been identified as a member of the uniformed state police in Niteroi. Brazil has separate police forces, one paramilitary and uniformed, the other civil and plainclothes.

Helio Saboya, the state secretary of civil police, acknowledged in an interview that police apparently were involved in the Niteroi killings, as he said they have been in death squad slayings elsewhere.

“Some of them go hunting,” Saboya said. “It is like a sport for them. And some are convinced that they are doing good.”

In the Baixada Fluminense suburbs north of Rio, he said, death squads were a “big, enormous problem” when he was appointed to head the detective force in September.

‘Barbaric Situation’

“It was a barbaric situation,” he said. But he said his policies have reduced death squad activities in the Baixada to “insignificant” proportions. He said he reorganized detective bureaus in the area, transferring many officers, increased resources available for investigation and did away with a system of informants, called X-9s, who provided detectives with information in exchange for freedom to extort and kill.

According to Saboya and others, X-9s are often former uniformed policemen who are still regarded as officers in their communities and who often participate in death squads.

In Niteroi, Saboya said, his order to stop using X-9s apparently has been ignored.

“There is going to be a very big shake-up in Niteroi,” he promised.

Ertulei Matos, a state prosecutor, expressed doubt that Saboya could control the death squads. They may be acting more carefully now in the Baixada Fluminense, but they are still there, Matos said.

“The problem is uncontrollable,” he said. “It will continue for a long time.”

Rooted in Poverty

Matos said death squads are rooted in poverty and the law’s impotence. He said it will take years to raise living standards in urban slums and reform the law enforcement and judicial systems in Brazil.

Death squads include groups called policia mineira-- men who are said to be paid by merchants to intimidate or eliminate thieves and robbers. Though policia mineira squads often include civilians, Matos said they are usually aided or controlled by police officers who condone their activities.

Because police officers are involved in death squads, he said, it is difficult to get police cooperation in investigating death squad killings.

Matos belongs to a special state commission that is investigating death squad killings. Since it was impaneled in June, it has been handed more than 30 cases involving more than 50 deaths, including the seven in Morro da Coreia.

Ten uniformed police officers are among some 30 suspects in the cases. So far, the commission has indicted 15 people, including half a dozen officers.