Police vehicles sit parked at the entrance of the Puraquequara prison in Manaus, Brazil. Photos / AP
Police vehicles sit parked at the entrance of the Puraquequara prison in Manaus, Brazil. Photos / AP
Authorities planned to move inmates around Brazil's overcrowded prison system today after at least 55 were strangled or stabbed to death in fights at four facilities.
"On our way," Justice Minister Sergio Moro tweeted. "We will also make spots available in federal prisons to transfer the leaders involved in these massacres."
The killings, which appear to stem from a power struggle within the Northern Family, Brazil's third-most powerful gang began on Monday at the Anísio Jobim penitentiary complex in Brazil's northwestern Amazonas state.
Authorities say inmates stabbed rivals with sharpened toothbrushes and choked them to death in front of visiting family members.
Forty more inmates were killed in three other Amazonas state prisons yesterday. The death count was so high that bodies were transported by meat trucks to other states for autopsies.
Local officials, worried that the clashes could spread, asked authorities to transfer gang leaders to federal prisons.
Brazil's prisons are effectively run by inmates, and fights between and within gangs often yield deadly results. One hundred and twenty inmates were killed in prisons across several states in January 2017.
Amazonas' state prosecutor urged the Government to retake control of the prisons using military force if necessary. But the state's Government tried to distance itself from the killings.
"It is nearly impossible to prevent these types of situations," Amazonas Governor Wilson Lima told Estado de Sao Paulo. "I guarantee the system is under control."
Brazil has the world's third largest prison populations. Nearly 800,000 inmates are crammed into facilities equipped to hold half that number.
Brazil's Government has long transferred gang leaders to prisons far from their homes in the hope of weakening the groups. But the policy has backfired by helping neighbourhood gangs develop a national reach. The country's prisons have become centres of initiation, where new inmates are sorted into gangs as soon as they enter.
Family members and friends wait to learn the identification of those inmates who killed in prison riots, outside a morgue in Manus.
As long-established gangs clash with new arrivals, leaders use violence to keep members in line.
"It's intended to send a message," said Rob Muggah, director of the think-tank Igarape Institute in Rio de Janeiro. "The control of organised crime groups depends on them exerting control outside prison gates, in neighbourhoods from where a lot of the prisoners come."
President Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned last year on promises to crack down on Brazil's violence, vowed to "stuff prison cells with criminals".
"I'd rather a prison cell full of criminals than a cemetery full of innocent people," he said. "We will build more if necessary."
Yet successive governments that promised to build more prisons weren't able to keep up with the ballooning inmate population. Space for more than 8650 inmates has been built since the beginning of 2018 - but the number of new inmates jumped by more than 17,800 over the same period, according to the Igarape Institute.
Prisons are so crowded that some inmates sleep standing up, their hands tied to the bars to keep from falling.
Muggah said the latest round of killings is "a reminder to this Government of the severity and complexity of the challenge they face.
"It underlines the fact that this is a problem that requires not just building more prisons or arresting more people, but rethinking approaches to reform entirely."
