New Massacre of Youngsters in Brazil. Police Are Main Suspect

[Judi Lynn]

New Massacre of Youngsters in Brazil. Police Are Main Suspect
Written by Elma Lia Nascimento
Monday, 05 March 2007

Five young men were murdered Saturday night in a school of Nova Iguaçu, in the Baixada Fluminense, an area to the north of Rio and part of the Greater Rio de Janeiro. For police chief Fábio Pacífico Marques, head of the 58th Police Bureau a death squad might be behind the massacre.

"This is a typical action of an extermination group, pseudo vigilantes who use violence to try to impose their will before the community."

This was Rio's third massacre in less than 40 days.

The police chief noted that the gunmen were careful to gather all the shell casings after the shooting to make more difficult the investigators' work. He also disclosed that three of the victims were killed point blank in the head after having been dominated.
(snip/...)

http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/7980/54/

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Death squad suspected in 5 Rio slayings
POSTED: 10:52 a.m. EST, March 5, 2007

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) -- Masked gunmen shot dead five people, including a teenager, during a children's party at a school soccer field on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro over the weekend, police said Monday.

Police in the poor suburb of Nova Iguacu suspected a death squad in the execution-style shootings, which sowed panic among children and parents on Saturday night. Two years ago, Nova Iguacu was the scene of one of Rio's worst death-squad massacres.

"Judging by the way the people were killed, the murders are certainly linked to an extermination group," an investigator, who did not want to be named, told Reuters.

The groups are often made up of off-duty police or former soldiers and charge slum dwellers fees to kill off drug traffickers or thieves.
(snip/...)

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/03/05/brazil.slayings.reut/

[madrchsod]

1. "cidade de deus" or "city of god"

this is one of the best films i have seen in my 50+ years of watching movies. one of the few films that i have ever watched in it`s entirety in one sitting..absolutely riveting. the story is about slums of rio and those who live and die there..

http://imdb.com/title/tt0317248/
Cidade de Deus (2002)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(film)
City of God (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Tempest]

3. Also see "Bus 174"

It shows what can happen as a result of the police death squads in Brazil.

[madrchsod]

4. belated thanks --i`ll check it out..

[MrPrax]

8. Customers who bought this item

also bought...

Pixote



City of God and Bus 174 are very good.

Caveat: None of these three films are for the faint of heart ... extremely depressing alert
(Positive Brazilian films: Bye Bye Brazil and Foreign Land)
Great list of Brazilian film here

Too bad their police are not as well trained as our own...

Some states put untrained cops on duty

Four months into his job, a police officer in Mississippi holds a gun to the head of an unarmed teenager and puts him in a chokehold. A rookie officer in Illinois gets into a car chase that kills a driver. And a new campus policeman in Indiana shoots an unarmed student to death. Some are blaming these harrowing episodes on what an Associated Press survey found is a common practice across the country: At least 30 states let some newly hired local law enforcement officers hit the streets with a gun, a badge and little or no training.

These states allow a certain grace period - six months or a year in most cases, two years in Mississippi and Wisconsin - before rookies must be sent to a police academy. In many cases, these recruits are supposed to be supervised by a full-fledged officer, but that does not always happen.

The risks, some say, are high.

"You wouldn't want a brain surgeon who isn't properly trained. Someone shouldn't be out there carrying a badge and a gun unless they are qualified to be out there," said Jeremy Spratt, program manager of the Missouri Peace Officer Standards and Training Program.

San Jose Mercury News

[Vidar]

2. More of Negroponte's Angels?

[Porcupine]

5. I always wonder why dead kids are not....

as interesting as sex scandals? If this were a teacher having sex with a teenager there would be dozens of posts. As is this will sink to the bottom.

What's the problem we have with keeping children alive and healthy?

[Judi Lynn]

6. Here's some information that shows anyone unaware of this problem that it's a very OLD, ugly problem

going back far too many years. This came up quickly in a search:

24 April 1995
THE KILLINGS ESCALATE IN BRAZIL
Street Children: More and More Killed Everyday
By Caius Brandao
ICRI Brazil Project Coordinator

Brazil has highly progressive children's rights legislation, the world's largest and strongest movement for the rights of street children and was one of the first countries to sign and ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Why, then, does the ever-growing number of murdered children and adolescents seem to have no end? Why, indeed, are more and more Brazilian children dying while society already has at hand powerful tools for the protection of their rights?

The answer, lamentably, is that killing children is a profitable 'pastime' in Brazil. The so called 'cycle of impunity' means not only neglect or omission, but a rather profitable corruption scheme within public security and law-enforcement agencies. Tania de Almeida, head judge of Duque de Caxias Court, delivered a powerful speech at the Street Children Hearing in Copenhagen. The judge explained a vicious circle: the powerful elite in Rio pay private security agencies to provide for its safety; these agencies are headed by police officers or chiefs of the Military Police; rank-and-file police officers, unable to live on their salaries, often moonlight, quite commonly for the security agencies; reassured by the cycle of impunity, the security agencies branch out into 'illegal' business, which as often as not, turns out to be 'cleaning up' the streets for dissatisfied merchants; cleaning up the streets comes to mean eliminating the children of the poor perceived as one of the source of Rio's modern-day problems. Judge de Almeida went on to characterize the staff of these private security agencies as largely comprised of professional killers. Finally, according to de Almeida, there are several Rio 'parlamentares', or city officials, who, once professional killers themselves, currently protect their 'successors'.

Clearly, there is a perceived benefit to killing destitute children, not only to those who directly profit from it, i.e., the hit-men. When street children die it also 'benefit' the people who paid the professional killers to clean up the streets in the first place. The benefit of children-free streets can get to be very expensive, since the killers need protection at the judicial level as well, and this is where corruption comes into play. Money and political power are the most common means of undermining the law in Brazil. Ultimately, the Children and Adolescent Act (ECA) and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child become dead-letters. Despite well-voiced national and international outrage, murder, the most violent abuse against children, continues to go unpunished by the government. According to Amnesty International, 90% of the killings of impoverished Brazilian children and adolescents--who are mostly of African descent--have never been resolved because of the infamous cycle of impunity. As a result, the killings escalate.
(snip/...)

http://pangaea.org/street_children/latin/brazil.htm

[Judi Lynn]

7. Targeted for death: Brazil's street children - Cover Story

Targeted for death: Brazil's street children - Cover Story
Christian Century, Jan 20, 1993 by Paul Jeffrey

Batman looked down on the children sleeping in a huddled mass under the movie theater marquee. Batman O Retorno had come to northeast Brazil, but the movie's hero could do nothing for the poor waifs seeking only a moment of peace in which to dream of a different world.

The streets of Recife and other Brazilian cities are more dangerous these days than Gotham City. And the children themselves are fighting back, supported by an increasing number of church-people.

Brazil's growing population of street children is attracting world attention. Homeless children languish in other South American countries as well. According to UNICEF, 100 million children live on the streets of the world's cities, an inordinate half of them in Latin America and the Caribbean. Throughout this region, 78 million children live in what the United Nations considers "extreme poverty." Half the region's children are poor, and a majority of the region's poor are children.

In addition to facing hunger and want, or children contend with increasing violence from those who make them scapegoats for troubled economic times. In large cities from Buenos Aires to Monterrey, law enforcement agencies are carrying out "class cleansing." They are exterminating children. In Guatemala City in 1990, for example, National Police officers kicked to death 13-year-old Nahaman Carmona on a city street, in plain sight of witnesses. Some 100 street children accompanied Carmona's body to the cemetery, where he was buried under a gravestone that reads, "All I wanted was to be a child, but they wouldn't let me."
(snip/...)

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n2_v110/ai_13375031

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CHILDREN IN THE STREETS OF BRAZIL:
Drug Use, Crime, Violence, and HIV Risks
James A. Inciardi and Hilary L. Surratt
Substance Use and Misuse, 1997

ABSTRACT
The presence of vast numbers of unsupervised and unprotected children is a phenomenon that is common throughout Latin America, and in few places are the street children more visible, and reviled, than in Brazil. Estimates of their numbers in Brazil have ranged from 7 to 17 million, but more informed assessments suggest that between 7 and 8 million children, ages 5 to 18, live and/or work on the streets of urban Brazil. Accounts of drug abuse among street youths in Brazil are commonplace. Numerous scientific studies and media stories have reported the widespread use of inhalants, marijuana and cocaine, and Valium among street children. Also common is the use of coca paste and Rohypnol. Risk of exposure to HIV is rapidly becoming an area of concern because of the large number of street youths engaging in unprotected sexual acts, both renumerated and non-renumerated. Moreover, Brazil's street children are targets of fear. Because of their drug use, predatory crimes, and general unacceptability on urban thoroughfares, they are frequently the targets of local vigilante groups, drug gangs, and police "death squads." Although there have been many proposals and programs for addressing the problems of Brazilian street youth, it would appear that only minimal headway has been achieved.

The United Nations Center for Human Rights has estimated that by the year 2000 half of the world's population will be under 25 years of age and located in cities, and that significant numbers will be living in poverty (UNICEF, 1996a). The United Nations also estimated that by the end of this century there will be almost 250 million more urban children in the 5-to-19 year old age cohort then there were in the mid-1980s; that more than 90% of these youths will be living in developing nations; and that by the year 2020 there will be some 100 million indigent urban minors in Latin America alone. It is likely, furthermore, that many of these children will be living in the streets (UNICEF, 1996b).

The use of the street as a place to live and/or work is not unknown to most industrial economies, but the presence of vast numbers of unsupervised and unprotected children is a phenomenon that is visible only in developing nations, and particularly in Latin America (Rizzini and Lusk, 1995; Lusk, 1989). Estimates of the number of street children throughout Central and South America vary widely, but the United Nations Children's Fund figure of 40 million is the most generally accepted (UNICEF, 1996b). Many of these youths are exploited and abused, and because of their pariah status in the eyes of the public they are referred to with a variety of disapproving appellations -- gamines (urchins) and chinches in Colombia, pajaros fruteros in Peru, and marginais (nonessentials or criminals), pivetes (little farts), and abandonados (children who have nowhere else to go) in Brazil. And in few places are the street children more visible, and reviled, than in Brazil.
(snip/...)

http://www.udel.edu/butzin/articles/child.html

[Zynx]

9. Got Death Squad?

Moonlighting police are a huge problem in Brazil.