New São Paulo attacks again surprise authorities
A new wave of attacks in São Paulo, on police and security personnel, public buildings and buses, appears to have caught the authorities unaware, despite the fact that a steady build-up had been under way at least since mid-June. The government, which attributed the attacks to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the gang which staged a bloody uprising in early May, said the latest wave had been 'unplanned'.
According to Saulo de Abreu, São Paulo's public security secretary, the most recent attacks, on 12 July, were a response to 'unfounded' reports that several of the top leaders of the PCC were about to be transferred to a high-security prison in another state (Paraná). The reports did appear to have some foundation: what Abreu specifically denied was that the state government had drawn up a list of the PCC inmates to be transferred, and that a list published in the local media was 'false'. He did not quite deny the intention to carry out the transfer.
The May uprising was launched in response to the government's intention of transferring several PCC bosses to higher-security prisons within São Paulo state.
Since shortly after the May uprising the PCC had been conducting a two-pronged offensive: on the one hand, attacks on prison guards at or near their home; on the other, a new series of prison mutinies. The prison guards' union has reported 14 members murdered since mid-May, five of them since the beginning of July, and that 10 others had chosen to leave their homes after receiving death threats. It says the PCC's intentions had become clear with the discovery in June that personnel records had been stolen from prison system archives.
The police had received a further warning in the form of a tip-off which allowed, on 26 June, the disruption of a group of PCC gunmen as they were preparing to conduct attacks on prison guards. The prison guards, though, were not the only targets: in early July members of the civil police narrowly escaped being killed in drive-by shooting at their homes; on 8 July an officer guarding the federal courts building in central São Paulo was gunned down.
The most spectacular of the June prison riots took place in the Araraquara establishment, where inmates destroyed all four cell wings and the authorities responded by enclosing all 1,447 of them in a yard and soldering the gates shut, creating what even the government describes as a 'humanitarian crisis'. In the Mirandópolis prison, where 1,200 inmates are crammed into space designed to hold only 200, one major riot was quelled in June, only to be followed by a second one in early July.
To make matters worse, on 6 July the prison guards' union called its members out on a strike which has since spread to 50 of the state's 174 prisons. At the top of its list of demands is that the guards be allowed to bear arms outside the prisons as well as inside, so as to stand a better chance of defending themselves from the PCC gunmen.
A prison guard was among the six people known to have been killed in the attacks staged on 12 July, and the link between these attacks and the developments in the prisons was made quite evident by placards left at the scenes of several incidents, decrying the 'oppression' prevailing in the prison system. A police officer and three private security guards were also among the 12 July fatalities.
The authorities have signalled willingness to grant the prison guards their main demand, and have also started talking about releasing prison inmates charged with lesser crimes in order to alleviate the overcrowding that has been fuelling the riots. Overall, it is reckoned that the São Paulo prisons were built to hold 106,500 inmates, but actually house 138,000 — 38.2% of Brazil's entire prison population.