| By yesterday, the police of Brazil's largest state of Sao Paulo had neutralized the militants of the First Capital Command (FCC). We are talking about an organized criminal group specializing in drug trafficking and weapons smuggling. The last resisters were destroyed outside the city of the same name, the administrative center of the state. And two days earlier, the rioters, having freed 350 hostages, laid down their arms in 87 prisons engulfed in riots. According to rumors, this was the result of a truce concluded between the authorities and the mafia, which the police categorically deny.
The war declared by the police mafia began a week ago. Then the authorities, having gathered 765 members of the PUK, including eight of its leaders, in different prisons, moved them all to one high-security prison, located half a thousand kilometers from Sao Paulo. Immediately after this, about 300 attacks were carried out using all types of small arms not only on police stations, posts and motor patrols, but also on the homes of law enforcement officers; they were shot at even when they were walking home, having already changed into civilian clothes. Bandits robbed 15 banks, destroyed a metro station and burned more than 80 buses. 93 militants on the streets, 41 policemen, 18 prisoners in prisons and four bystanders died - a total of 156 people.
Brazil's parliament on Wednesday passed 30 laws targeting organized crime. They provide for the creation of a prison intelligence department, extend the terms of the “godfathers” in solitary confinement, complicate the parole procedure and oblige mobile operators to jam signals near prisons.
But Brazilian President Lula da Silva urged lawmakers to “not get carried away.” He recalled that over the past 30 years, “the meager subsidization of education has robbed young people of their future and doomed them to a life of crime.” Therefore, “money should be spent not on prisons, but on schools.”
It cannot be said that recent events have greatly surprised Brazilians. In February 2001, the mafia "Party of Crime", the predecessor of the PUK, started a riot in two dozen prisons in the state of Sao Paulo due to the fact that the authorities then distributed its leaders to different prisons. Almost five thousand people who came on a date were taken hostage, including more than a thousand children. 123 people died then.
“The background to the Brazilian bloodshed is purely criminal,” Deputy Director of the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Martynov told Vremya Novostei yesterday. He explained that Brazil, a population of 185 million, has outlived racism, but due to historical and other reasons, the mafia is replenished mainly by dark-skinned inhabitants of poor villages (the so-called favelas), and the law enforcement agencies serve mainly people with light skin color. The statements of President Lula da Silva are quite understandable, noted Boris Martynov, “since the bandit armies in Brazil are growing en masse among disadvantaged - illiterate and unemployed - youth.” Alexey SLOBODIN
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