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Mass murder. Death squads. Roadside executions ... the truth about policing Brazilian-style
The Daily Mail, August 25, 2005

THE CYNICS probably cracked a smile yesterday when the Brazilian Ambassador and two judicial officials from Brazil pronounced themselves satisfied that the Metropolitan Police investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is thorough and that there has been no cover-up.

For if they say so, it must be true.

Because who could possibly know more about police shootings and cover-ups than officials from the Brazilian judiciary?

And though these gentlemen from the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the Ministry of Justice had little choice but to come here given the strength of public outrage in Brazil about the de Menezes case, the very idea of Brazilian authorities giving their approval to British justice has a surreal quality.

After all, police in the country's two biggest cities, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, murder - and yes, that is the term used by human rights groups - hundreds of people every year with almost total impunity. They are also infamous for torture, extortion, drugdealing and summary executions within the country's prison system.

According to an Amnesty International report on Brazil, 'hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians' have been killed by police in alleged 'gun battles'in the past year. 'Few if any of these cases were fully investigated.

There were consistent reports of police participation in death squads.

The use of torture was widespread and systematic,' they said.

A recent U.S. State Department report says that Brazilian police have 'committed many extrajudicial killings, tortured and beaten suspects under interrogation; police also were implicated in criminal activity of all kinds, including killings for hire, death squad executions, kidnappings for ransom and narcotics trafficking.' To put the Brazilian outrage over the de Menezes case in perspective, in the first six months of 2005 alone, police in Rio killed 501 people.

And last year official figures cited 983 killings by police in Rio. That is more than the total number of all murders in England and Wales (833) - and was seen as a marked improvement over recent years.

Most of the victims were young, poor and black.

In just one incident in March this year, police 'massacred' 27 people in two impoverished suburbs of Rio (three more died of their wounds). One of the victims was a 13-year-old schoolboy.

The killings were apparently a reprisal for the arrest of police officers - a rare occurrence - suspected of murdering two other men held in custody earlier that week. After this incident, Amnesty and other human rights groups were quick to point out the similarity to Brazil's infamous police death-squad massacres that took place in 1993.

That was when police in civilian clothes murdered eight street children as they slept outside Rio's Candelaria church as part of an effort to clean upthe city's streets. A month later, 21 people in the Vigario Geral shanty town were gunned down by police, apparently in retaliation for the killing of officers who were themselves involved in drug dealing.

Throughout the Nineties, there were countless reports of police beating, raping, torturing and killing street children, who were being blamed by Brazilians for an epidemic of street crime.

This provoked international condemnation, as did the prison massacre at Carandiru in 1992 when police shot 111 inmates. It was later established that 85 of the prisoners were killed in their cells, though the official story was that there had been a 'shoot out'.

After another prison riot at Carandiru in 2001, eyewitnesses saw police shoot three prisoners in the back after an uprising had already been quelled. Extrajudicial executions continue in Brazil's prisons, according to human rights experts.

The Brazilian people only became aware of the extent of their police brutality problem in 1997, when a news bulletin aired an amateur video showing Sao Paulo police extorting money and torturing men at a roadblock, then shooting two, killing one. A few days later another video emerged showing Rio police lining up and beating slum dwellers.

Today, every Brazilian knows about the torture in the police stations, about police corruption and involvement in the drugs trade, about contract killings by policemen, and about the use of unauthorised firearms for summary executions. Some policemen carry an extra, unlicensed gun as well as their regulation, officially-issued weapon. They call the illegal weapon a 'black gun' and the official one the 'white gun'. Any murders or summary executions are carried out with the black gun.

That means that in the highly unlikely event of an investigation into such killings, the officers can simply hand in their clean, official 'white gun' for forensic testing, and discreetly dispose of the black one which
will never be traced or linked to the crime.

So why is it that Brazilian opinion tends to be less concerned with regular summary executions by their own police than with the killing of Mr. de Menezes in London? This is largely because the victims of these killings tend to be black and poor, and these lethal incidents take place in or near the city's notoriously lawless slums or favelas. On Monday, for instance, Rio police killed five suspected drug traffickers in one of the favelas in a supposed gun battle.No officers were hurt and there was no evidence of armed resistance by the alleged drug dealers.

Even when cases of extrajudicial execution are investigated, it is rare for police to be convicted.

In one fairly typical case in August 2004, seven homeless people were beaten to death in the centre of Sao Paulo. Two policemen and seven private security guards were charged with the killings. But as is so often the case, the charges were dropped for insufficient evidence.

This brutality and popular tolerance of it should be understood in the context of Rio's general lawlessness, and the resulting frustration of the middle classes.

Rio is an astonishingly violent city with a homicide rate of 50 per 100,000 (by contrast, New York's is 6.9 per 100,000 and London's is 2.4 per 100,000), making it more dangerous than many war zones.

Rio's police are so outgunned by drug dealers that the army has from time to time been called in to help battle drug gangs. Police enter the city's slums only in force and during military-style raids.

But that does not excuse the way the police operate with almost total freedom from investigation and punishment. As a result, human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have long described the police of Rio and Sao Paulo as among the most violent in the world.

Asma Jahangir, a special UN envoy who visited Brazil to investigate extrajudicial killings in 2003, found that police regularly - and quite literally - get away with murder and that the Brazilian judiciary is largely responsible for this state of affairs.

Ms Jahangir called for a UN investigation to find out why Brazil's courts fail to prosecute police for illegal killings. This idea was rejected by the Brazilian authorities and two of the witnesses who spoke to Jahangir were subsequently killed.

None of this justifies the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes or excuses what seems to be the astonishing incompetence of the Metropolitan Police operation in Stockwell.

And on the few occasions British police have used firearms, they have all too often shot the wrong person, most notoriously in the 1983 Stephen Waldorf case and in the shooting of Cherry Groce in Brixton in 1985.

If British security forces are to employ a 'shoot first' policy - because of the threat of terrorists with suicide bombs - they are going to have to improve their procedures and their personnel.

Nevertheless, the assiduousness of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the Press attention on the de Menezes case and the willingness of the police to cooperate with investigators are all in stark contrast to standard procedures in Brazil where 'shoot to kill' really does mean that.

And we can be sure that Jean Charles de Menezes and his family stand a much greater chance of seeing justice done here in England than if he had been just one of the hundreds of people shot by Rio police in murky circumstances.