Wall built to quell Brazil's deadly prison clashes

Special Operations Battalion Police officers enter the Alcacuz prison amid tension between rival gangs in Nisia Floresta, near Natal, Brazil. Photo: Felipe Dana/AP

Special Operations Battalion Police officers enter the Alcacuz prison amid tension between rival gangs in Nisia Floresta, near Natal, Brazil. Photo: Felipe Dana/AP

Published Jan 22, 2017

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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.

Reuters

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