By Thiago Mattos TheSequitur.com Contributor May 29, 2006
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – São Paulo, heart of Brazil’s financial center, finally can recuperate after four days of being held hostage by Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital) or PCC, a criminal organization that directed a wave of rebellions inside 78 prisons.
The rebels continued their fight outside of the jails by shooting at police and igniting buses, forums and banks. The death total is estimated at 70 people.
PCC caused the city’s biggest traffic jam this year and potentially its biggest ever with a 195 km backup during the evening rush hour. More than five million people lacked transportation to return home after the bus companies suspended one-third of their fleets, fearing more bus fires.
The panic that took over the city was heightened by wide media coverage, state officials said. What they neglected to mention, however, was how the situation relates to one of Brazil’s biggest social problems: the nonexistence of an effective public policy to combat urban violence.
The terrible state of the Brazilian prison system, coupled with the lack of integration among civil, federal and military police, once again remind us to seriously consider an issue that unmercifully creates victims. Easy corruption of poorly trained and underpaid police officers and the absence of a federal agency to counter organized crime only worsen the problem.
In contrast to Rio de Janeiro, a neighboring state that deals with the same issue, São Paulo’s criminals operate in organized and centralized circles. Their coordinated attacks are facilitated by use of cellular phones inside the prisons. Even inmates of other states rebel and obey orders that come from São Paulo.
The dirty money machine spun from drug and weapon trafficking creates networks that make it difficult to know where each cut comes from. Gangs, for example, organize themselves by contraband, or around entities such as the city’s transportation and waste disposal services.
Little by little, it all gets mixed. Soon, the illegal money handled by criminals will finance electoral campaigns.
Researchers point to a continuation of the criminal attacks both inside the prisons and on the streets. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant, a professor at UC-Berkeley and expert on the issue, charges that the Brazilian elite have been using the penal state – police, tribunals and the courts system – as an income and rent control for the urban poor.
The prison system functions as a “concentration camp” for the very poor, he said.
Crime in Brazil should not be remedied, but instead examined from its source. The state itself propagates class and racial prejudice by the way it confronts urban problems – just take a look at Brazilian prisoners and you will realize where they come from.
We need to address the fact that social inequality is institutionalized in Brazil. For sure, criminals must be treated like criminals, but just trying to kill them does not solve anything.
Episodes such as the Carandiru prison outbreaks and the hostage crisis on bus 174 are evidence that as long as we ignore the root of the problem, the massacre of innocent people will become known as a naturalized phenomenon. Thiago Mattos has a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He writes about Brazilian and world issues in his blog, Sangue de Barata, and is a founding member of Poesia & Cia, a Brazilian alternative magazine.
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