At least 25 confirmed dead in Brazil prison riot
The prison built for 620 prisoners was holding about 1,100.
RIO DE JANEIRO — The death toll of a riot in a penitentiary in northeastern Brazil rose Sunday to at least 25 prisoners, increasing the number of prison killings this year in the country to more than 120.
Decapitations and mutilations are common in Brazil’s violent, overcrowded prisons, in which 40 percent of inmates have yet to be sentenced, but the latest wave of brut alit y has appalled many here.
The riot began about 5 p.m. Saturday at the State Penitentiary of Alcauz, 13 miles from Natal, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and continued until around 7 a.m. Sunday, when riot police officers took control of the prison.
“The situation of the rebellion is controlled,” said Maj. Eduardo Franco of the Rio Grande do Norte police.
The prison has a capacity of 620 prisoners, but was holding about 1,100 when the riot began, authorities said. All of the inmates had been sentenced, Franco said.
S p e a k i n g f r o m i n s i d e the prison Sunday, Wilma Batista, director of the prison agents’ union in Rio Grande do Norte, said she had seen 27 bodies, 25 of which were mutilated.
She sent a photograph of two headless, mutilated corpses in a prison yard via a cellphone messaging service and said she had seen many others.
“We are shocked,” she said.
State government authorities have yet to confirm the number of deaths.
With Brazil swamped in recession, President Michel Temer’s government reeling from one graft scandal after another, and a wave of seemingly uncontrollable prison violence, many Brazilians feel they are going back to a darker recent past when crime, corruption and the economy were out of control.
“We t h o u g h t w e h a d turned that page, and now it is coming back,” said Mauricio Santoro, a professor of international relations and political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.
The killings marked the escalation of a deadly gang war that exploded when 56 prisoners were massacred in a prison in Manaus in Amazonas state on Jan. 1. Four more were killed the next day in another jail in the city.
State authorities ascribed blame for the Manaus deaths to the Family of the North, an Amazon drug gang that had attacked prisoners connected to a rival gang, the São Paulo-based First Capital Command, known by its Portuguese acronym, PCC.
The gangs were believed to be fighting for control of lucrative drug smuggling routes. The PCC was for years allied to a Rio de Janeiro drug gang called the Red Command. Last year the alliance fell apart, leading to a spate of prison killings.
On Jan. 6, after the Manaus massacre, 33 prisoners were found butchered at a prison in Boa Vista in Roraima state, in the far north of Brazil. State authorities said the PCC was behind the killings. Four more prisoners were killed in a third Manaus prison after being moved from the site of the first massacre.