26 Inmates Dead in Brazil After Rival Drug Gangs Clash: Some Beheaded

Added by Linda Hamilton on January 16, 2017.
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Tags: Rio Grande prison

The latest Brazilian prison riot has left a confirmed 26 inmates dead – and at least three men beheaded.Rival drug gangs have been clashing in the country’s prison system since the start of the year and a number of massacres have led to 140 prisoner deaths.

Security forces stormed the prison at dawn on Sunday and restored order after 14 hours of violence, local authorities said. They now believe all bodies are accounted for.

The state security office for Rio Grande do Norte state had reported earlier in the day that there were 27 deaths, but later lowered that by one.

State security officials said fighting between rival gangs broke out Saturday at the adjacent Alcacuz and Rogerio Coutinho prisons near the city of Natal.

Officials waited until dawn Sunday before entering to try to re-impose control, state security chief Caio Cesar Bezerra said.

“This way we guaranteed a calm intervention, a pacific intervention without resistance from the inmates,” Bezerra said.
Photos taken yesterday show the magnitude of violence that plagues the country’s incarceration system.

Like many prisons across the country, Alcacuz is overcrowded, with more than 1,000 inmates crammed into a facility meant for 620.

Another official earlier said at least three inmates were beheaded – a feature of similar massacres in other jails at the start of this month.

Police had surrounded the prison overnight, but waited until noon to enter because of reports that inmates remained armed and out of their cells.

They were eventually rounded up and stripped naked for an inspection as angry relatives of the inmates gathered outside the prison waiting for information.

The bloodbath that erupted on Saturday night was the latest of several gruesome gang-related massacres this year in the country’s overcrowded prisons.

The recent outbreak of prison violence began on January 1, when 56 inmates were killed in the northern state of Amazonas.

Authorities said the Family of the North gang targeted members of Brazil’s most powerful criminal gang, First Command, in a clash over control of drug-trafficking routes in northern states.

Many of the dead were beheaded and dismembered. Four other inmates were killed at a smaller prison.

Then on Jan. 6, in the neighboring state of Roraima, 33 prisoners were killed, many with their hearts and intestines ripped out.

Meanwhile, the prison chief for the southern state of Parana, Luiz Alberto Cartaxo, told Brazil’s Globonews network that 21 inmates escaped from the Piraquara prison on Sunday after using explosives to break through the prison wall.

He said two other inmates died in a confrontation with police while trying to flee.

Police investigator Otacilio de Medeiros previously told reporters that ‘There are probably more than 30 dead’ at the Alcacuz prison in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, after leaving the jail.

Officials said members of two separate drug gangs had come out of different parts of the prison and clashed violently.

‘There are at least three inmates dead because we were able to see their heads,’ state prisons manager Zemilton Silva told local media on Saturday.

The prison, just outside the state capital Natal, is built for a maximum of 620 inmates but currently houses 1,083, the state justice department said.

Brazilian media said the riot was thought to be a clash between Brazil’s biggest drug gang, the First Capital Command (PCC), and a group allied to its main rival Red Command.

Experts say the wave of violence is part of a war between drug gangs battling for control of one of the world’s most important cocaine markets and trafficking routes.

The series of massacres in the first week of January left 100 prisoners dead – many of them active members of gangs, authorities said.

The biggest bloodbath, in the northwestern city of Manaus, left about 60 dead. It appeared to be an orchestrated mass killing targeting members of the PCC.

It was thought to be a backlash by the PCC’s rivals for its violent expansion.