Brazil Confronts Prison Gang Violence

Members on Outside Challenge Government With Another Wave of Attacks

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Aug. 9 -- Some consequences of the violence ordered by a powerful prison gang this week are starkly obvious: broken glass around several government buildings downtown, the twisted metal of crippled ATMs, smoldering carcasses of public buses in the suburbs.

But the invisible effects are equally perceptible to the people here, changes that Ricardo Ferreira feels when he slips into a navy blue jacket and tie. The private attorney now feels marked when he wears a suit, he said, someone who could be easily mistaken for the type of government official the gang's members outside the prisons are targeting in an ongoing battle for control of a deeply troubled penal system.

"The way I dress is a problem -- the gang members can't tell I'm a private employee and not someone from the government," said Ferreira, 23, after concluding a meeting Wednesday in the Finance Ministry, one of the buildings firebombed on Tuesday. "In my office now, we are evaluating our appointments in public buildings, determining which are the most important and deciding which we should go to."

The First Capital Command gang -- better known by its Portuguese abbreviation, PCC -- began waging war against the government in May after learning that officials were planning to transfer its leaders to a single remote prison. Using cellular phones, which many gang members keep in their prison cells, the PCC coordinated revolts in more than 70 state prisons to protest the move.

During that initial wave of violence, gang members outside the prisons burned buses and attacked public buildings. The police responded by hunting down suspected PCC members in their neighborhoods and killing them. More than 170 people were killed in a week.

A government employee later admitted that he had alerted PCC lawyers about the transfer plan by selling them a recording of a closed-door government meeting on the issue -- a disclosure that illustrated the gang's extensive reach throughout Brazil.

Another wave of attacks in July left six people dead, and so far this week PCC members have launched more than 100 attacks. Police have shot and killed at least six suspected gang members since Monday.

The motives ascribed to the most recent attacks reinforce the gang's reputation for audacity. According to a spokeswoman with the Public Ministry, a state prosecutor last Thursday told a radio station he would recommend that the 932 prisoners in Sao Paulo who are eligible for home visits this weekend for Father's Day should remain locked up. The Public Ministry, which includes the prosecutors' headquarters, was one of the buildings firebombed Tuesday.

"It's not a coincidence that the Public Ministry is a victim of acts like those of yesterday," said Rodrigo R. Pinho, the state's chief prosecutor, according to his spokeswoman. "The role of the Public Ministry is not to be intimidated by the PCC, to react firmly so that in the future Brazil won't be like Colombia, where organized crime rules half of its territory."

The PCC has a history of protesting government decisions it deems unsavory. According to interviews with prison guards in May, the PCC has successfully demanded better prison food, more familial visits and more television sets to watch the World Cup. But since the riots in May, the government has taken a harder line to try to gain greater control of an overcrowded state prison system populated by about 142,000 inmates.

According to prison outreach workers and law enforcement experts, the PCC attracts new members among inmates by giving them essentials -- such as toothbrushes, soap and food -- that the financially stressed government often does not provide. In exchange for the goods, the recruits pledge their loyalty to the gang.

On Wednesday, police stood guard outside public buildings and regularly stopped many of the city's formidable number of "motoboys" -- messengers who dart through Sao Paulo's clotted traffic. On one busy downtown street corner in late morning, a motoboy waited patiently while a police officer searched his canvas satchel and scanned his delivery invoice.

Despite such pockets of increased vigilance and the anxiety felt by people like Ferreira, daily life here has not changed significantly in recent days -- a marked contrast to May, when the attacks froze bus traffic and prompted many residents of South America's largest city to stay home from work.

Pedestrians still flooded the city streets Wednesday. They enjoyed unseasonably warm temperatures in the city's parks. They withdrew cash from ATMs, and they sipped cold beers at open-air, street-side bars.

José Bezerra da Silva, 56, was among those who kept to his routine Wednesday. As usual, he stood outside the Finance Ministry in a bright orange vest, leading pedestrians into waiting taxicabs. Like some others here, he said he suspected that politics has as much to do with the violence as the battle between the PCC and the government. He said he believed that common vandals blew out the glass doors, not hardened gang members.

"They link this to the PCC because the government doesn't want to take responsibility for controlling delinquency," said Bezerra da Silva, standing next to a wooden stool that he keeps chained and padlocked to a streetlight. "They blame the PCC, saying it's a huge problem they can't control, and they wash their hands of everything."