Brazil needs to do more to stem Rio violence-group
06 Mar 2007 00:01:31 GMT Source: Reuters
By Andrei Khalip RIO DE JANEIRO, March 5 (Reuters) - The Brazilian government should do more to stop the widespread bloodshed in Rio de Janeiro, where vigilante groups have emerged to battle drug gangs for control of the slums, a leading human rights group said on Monday. Amnesty International said the violence was not expected to decline this year in Rio and it called for better trained police and other public security reforms to tame violence in Brazil's big cities. The group's statement came as police investigated an execution-style killing on Saturday of five young men at a school soccer field on the outskirts of Rio, apparently at the hands of a death squad. These vigilante groups are often made up of off-duty police or former soldiers who kill drug traffickers or thieves and charge residents protection fees. Some take full control of slums, kicking drug gangs out. Similar takeovers triggered a wave of bloodshed last December, when drug gangs retaliated by attacking police posts and torching buses. The rise of the vigilante groups "is an extremely worrying development symptomatic of the vacuum left for many years by the state," Amnesty said. "These neighborhoods are now being contested by displaced drug traffickers in a phase that heralds yet more violence for the city in 2007," it said. Rio's annual murder rate of about 40 per 100,000 people is one of the highest in Latin America. Amnesty called on President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to work closely with the new governors of Rio and Sao Paulo states to tackle the causes of violence such as social discrimination, corruption and human rights violations in the criminal justice system and to end police brutality. Sao Paulo suffered from several waves of gang attacks between May and August last year. Over 200 people were killed. Amnesty also criticized the first Rio slum raid in which the elite National Public Security Force took part last month. Six people were killed in the operation, including bystanders, and its sole result was a confiscated rifle and a grenade. On Monday, a 13-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet during a standoff between police and drug traffickers in a slum called Monkeys' Mountain. Two suspects were also shot dead. In the suburban town of Nova Iguacu, which was the scene of one of Rio's worst death-squad massacres two years ago, masked gunmen shot dead five people aged between 17 and 30, as they played soccer on Saturday night during a children's party. "Judging by the way the people were killed the murders are certainly linked to an extermination group," an investigator, who did not want to be named, told Reuters. At least one of the victims had been involved in drug trafficking, police said. All five were shot in the back and head. In March 2005, a death squad went on a rampage in Nova Iguacu and Queimados suburbs, killing 29 men, women and children at random. One policeman has been convicted of the massacre and several are awaiting trial.
