Sao Paulo - Brazilian security officials
worked to complete an improvised wall of metal shipping
containers on Sunday inside a prison where rival gangs have
clashed in the past week, resulting in the brutal killing of 26
inmates.
The rusty red containers were hauled into the Alcacuz prison
yard in northeastern Brazil, with officials aiming to finish the
temporary wall, stacking one container atop another, by sundown
Sunday.
It is a desperate move for security officials struggling to
keep control of Alcacuz, where the latest in a string of brutal
prison massacres in Brazil's north and northeast took place Jan.
14. Members of the nation's most powerful gang attacked rivals
with machetes and knives, beheading and quartering many of the
26 killed.
The outbreak of violence was the latest in Brazil's
beleaguered penitentiary system, where about 140 people have
died in clashes since Jan. 1.
The overcrowded prisons are now the battleground in a
quickly escalating war between the nation's two biggest drug
gangs, the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command (PCC) and the
Red Command based in Rio de Janeiro.
For two decades, the two factions have maintained a working
relationship, ensuring a steady flow of drugs and arms over
Brazil's porous border. But about six months ago, the PCC began
trying to muscle the Red Command out of key drug routes.
The PCC has aggressively moved into new areas in the north
and northeast of Brazil, where the deadly prison riots have
taken place in recent weeks. In response, the Red Command allied
itself with local gangs, enlisting them to take on the PCC.
The killings began on Jan. 1, when the powerful North Family
gang, an ally of the Red Command, killed 56 inmates at a prison
in Amazonas state, mostly PCC members.
The North Family controls a lucrative cocaine route along
the Solimoes, a branch of the Amazon that flows from Colombia
and Peru, the world's top two cocaine-producing nations.
The PCC retaliated on Jan. 6 by killing 33 inmates at the
Monte Cristo prison in the neighboring state of Roraima and then
carrying out the killings at Alcacuz this weekend.
Then at Alcacuz in Rio Grande do Norte state, PCC members
slaughtered rivals belonging to the "Crime Union of RN" - a gang
carrying the state's initials - whose members were killed last
weekend by PCC inmates.