Inequality in Brazil 'tearing nation apart'

Gang violence that has rocked Brazil's business capital Sao Paulo in the past week should serve as a warning to the nation's richer classes that the country's deep social inequalities were tearing it apart, the Sao Paulo State Governor said.

In a full-page interview in leading newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, Governor Claudio Lembo also denied police were carrying out massacres to quell the violence, in which about 140 people have been killed since last Friday.

"All this has been a big wake-up for Brazil. The social situation is the cancer for crime and it is bigger than we imagined," he said.

Brazil's most powerful criminal gang, the First Command of the Capital (PCC), unleashed a wave of bloodshed in Sao Paulo city and state at the weekend in retaliation for the transfer of jailed gang leaders and members to a remote high-security prison.

Dozens of policeman were killed in attacks on police posts, vehicles and off-duty officers. Dozens of buses were also set ablaze. Related uprisings broke out in dozens of prisons across the state to demand better conditions.

The attacks caused panic and chaos in Sao Paulo, the world's third-largest metropolis with a population of 20 million. It had largely subsided by midweek after police killed around 100 suspected gangsters in operations through poor districts of the city.

While condemning the gangsters, human rights groups have expressed concern the police are resorting to extra-judicial executions to stamp out the violence.

Asked if the police were carrying out revenge attacks in which innocent people may be killed, Lembo said the police were under control.

"There are clashes every night in the streets.

"The police are acting to avoid the worst for society."

While crime and lawlessness is rampant in Brazil's cities, the scale of the Sao Paulo gang offensive was unprecedented.

Lembo had candid words for Brazil's upper classes, saying the crime problem was rooted in the desperate poverty and wide gap between rich and poor in the nation of 185 million people.

"We have a white minority that is very perverse. The bourgeoisie will have to open their pockets to lift the misery so there are more jobs, more education," he said.

While leftist politicians and humanitarian organisations have long linked crime to deprivation, Lembo's comments were notable as he is a member of the right-wing Liberal Front Party and comes from a banking background.

Many of Brazil's upper classes endorse repressive police tactics and show little concern for social problems. "Brazil is disintegrating and losing its civic values," Lembo said.

- REUTERS