For The Rio Times
Seven violent attacks were reported in the southern Brazil state of Santa Catarina on Monday night, as a wave of violence which has seen dozens of buses torched reached its seventh day. In total, 54 violent incidents have been reported in 18 cities statewide since January 30th, military police said.
Read more here.
For The Rio Times
At least fourteen São Paulo police officers have been detained since Saturday on suspicion of killing or attempting to kill civilians. The arrests are likely to raise questions over police brutality in the wake of a wave of murders in São Paulo that some experts have partially attributed to extrajudicial killings.
Read more here.
For Americas Quarterly
The numbers are almost too much to take in: 4,100 murdered this year. This figure does not refer to a war-torn country, but to São Paulo state: the biggest driver of Brazil’s economy.
As a report came out last week showing that Brazil had seen as many violent deaths—500,000—over the past 10 years as Somalia’s 20-year civil war, the death toll in São Paulo city continued to rise.
For a decade, violence in São Paulo had been steadily declining. But recent months have seen a bloody wave sweeping South America’s biggest city—driven by what experts says is a war between police and thePrimeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital—PCC), a criminal gang based out of São Paulo’s prisons.
Read more here.
For The Rio Times
In the bloodiest weekend yet of the violent crime wave gripping São Paulo, 31 people lost their lives between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. Experts are calling the surge of violence part of an escalating war between police and the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital, PCC), a notorious gang involved in drug trafficking and organized crime.
Read more here.