Lawlessness and Frontier Justice on the Rise in Brazil’s Vast Interior : South America: Economic troubles, coupled with the lure of gold in the Amazon, have sparked a crime wave. The police seem powerless.

“Let him die slowly,” one of the lynch mob cried as the flames licked over Arci Garcia, whose lower body had been soaked in gasoline.

Minutes later, the thief and his two companions lay dead, their bodies charred and their skulls smashed.

“Long live the police,” one of the cheering onlookers shouted.

These scenes, covertly filmed by an amateur cameraman last November in the remote frontier town of Matupa, in Mato Grosso state, appalled many Brazilians when shown on television this month. The three men were burned alive after they broke into a landowner’s house, took hostages and asked for a ransom.

President Fernando Collor de Mello ordered an immediate investigation into the lynching, which the videotape suggested was carried out with the connivance of local police.

Yet, government officials admit that such instances of frontier justice are increasingly common in many of this giant country’s remote towns.

There are no reliable figures on killings and lynchings in Brazil’s interior. Many crimes go unrecorded, and responsibility for collecting data rests with understaffed and poorly funded state police forces, who often turn a blind eye.

Officials and human rights workers say that as Brazil’s economic crisis deepens--it is in the throes of its worst recession in years, and the poor have suffered most--the tide of violence is growing.

“Lynchings are on the rise in the interior,” said Menelio Moreira, an aide to the federal prosecutor general. “It’s part of a moral crisis which has resulted from mixing desperate poverty with the lure of drugs or gold.

“Human settlement has only existed in many frontier towns for about 20 years. Settlers tend to be loners cut off from their families, and many are involved in illegal gold prospecting or drug running.”

Recently back from a clandestine visit to Matupa, Moreira described the town in nightmarish terms.

“People there have lost all sense of humanity,” he said. “They have no fear of anything and enjoy total impunity for the crimes they commit. That lynching certainly wasn’t the first there, and it won’t be the last, either.”

Impunity from the law is a constant theme in Brazil.

In the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, hundreds of crimes go unsolved every month, and death squads dispense their own “justice” in slum areas.

In the frontier towns, many deep in the Amazon jungle or buried in the country’s arid outback, the problem is far worse.

A few isolated incidents--such as the 1988 murder of rain forest advocate Chico Mendes or the February assassination of rural workers’ leader Expedito Ribeiro de Souza--create enough of a stir abroad to oblige the federal government in Brasilia to intervene.

Last December, when the man who killed Mendes was convicted and jailed along with an accomplice who masterminded the murder, human rights activists said it was the first case ever in Brazil of a man being imprisoned for ordering a killing.

In the case of Expedito Ribeiro, police have arrested a gunman who has confessed to the shooting. But this is unusual.

“There was a lot of foreign interest in Expedito’s killing,” Justice Ministry spokesman Ivandro de Melo Medina said. He mentioned a protest letter sent to Collor by a group of U.S. senators.

“Otherwise, it would have been just another death.”

Catholic priest Ricardo Rezende, a friend of the murdered union leader, says that professional killers have become much more organized in the south of Para state. The landowners who pay them plan assassinations openly.

One example cited by the priest was the 1985 murder of a left-wing politician.

“Twenty-two people met to discuss the killing, with a maid serving whiskey. They talked about when to kill him, how to pay,” the priest told a press conference. No one was ever punished for the murder.

Justice in Brazil is principally a state responsibility, and the country’s 26 states are in crisis. Many are on the verge of bankruptcy and cannot pay their employees. Police are short of fuel for their cars, telephones are often broken and buildings are decaying.

In Mato Grosso do Sul state, which paid civil servants their November salaries in February, a state defense lawyer broke down in tears over his financial problems while defending a client in court.

“My electricity is about to be cut off. Banks have suspended my credit and blocked my credit card. My blood pressure has soared. . . . I am in no fit state to defend this man,” he told an astonished judge.

Human rights groups, however, do not accept that scarce police and court resources are an adequate explanation.

“That’s a very old excuse,” said one Amnesty International worker, who asked not to be identified. “The real problem is the lack of will on the part of the police to walk around the corner and see what is going on.