Brasil

  Rio Grande do Sul

BRAZIL IS GETTING A NEW  POLITICAL PARTY: ITS BASE IS IN STATE PRISION

 Larry Rohter

   São Paulo, Brazil — Having demonstrated its dominance of the prison system during a mass uprising, Brazil's most notorious criminal group is now looking to extend its influence by organizing a political party. Naturally, its platform calls for penal reform.

   The group, the First City Command, known by its initials in Portuguese, P.C.C., has already designated its first candidate for Congress in next year's national elections.

   He is Anselmo Neves Maia, a lawyer here who represents leaders of the organization. He says the group also plans to endorse candidates in other states who sympathize with the party platform.

   "Prisoners all over the country are mobilized behind this cause," he said, "and I am already getting calls from them asking me who their families should support and vote for."

   He added, "I am the candidate not just of the P.C.C., which has had the courage to rebel against the injustices practiced in the system, but of all the thousands of prisoners in Brazil's prisons."

   The new political organization is to be called the Party of the Incarcerated Community, whose initials would also be P.C.C. Its secretary general is Júlio César Silvério, who is serving six years for robbery and was described by Mr. Maia as "dynamic and enlightened, an admirer of your Benjamin Franklin." But the director of prisons for the state of São Paulo, Nagashi Furukawa, has characterized the First City Command as a crime syndicate that controls the trafficking of drugs, alcohol, weapons and mobile telephones within the state prison system.

   The authorities say the group also runs a flourishing "escape industry" that has resulted in the flight of more than 1,000 prisoners since 1998 and further enriched the group's coffers.

   São Paulo, with more than 36 million of Brazil's 170 million people, is Brazil's most populous state. Nearly 100,000 people, or just under half of the national total, are being held in the state's jails and prisons. The national government does not operate prisons.

   In February the First City Command organized the largest prison rebellion in the nation's history. Using cell phones smuggled into their cells, the group's leaders ordered their followers in 29 prisons around the state to take control of cellblocks and hold thousands of hostages. The uprising was meant to stop the authorities' actions to weaken the gang.

   The two-day uprising left 19 people dead, most of them members of three rival groups competing with the First City Command for control of São Paulo's prisons. Since then, officials have tried to weaken the gang by moving its leaders to prisons outside São Paulo, but some other states have balked, arguing that the crime group could simply spread.

   During the rebellion the group described itself as a prisoners' union and hung banners calling for "peace, justice and freedom" from cell windows and roofs. In August it published a political manifesto condemning a political system that in Mr. Maia's words "offers the benefits of the law for the rich and its rigors for the poor."

   The local press has quickly christened Mr. Maia "the candidate of organized crime," but he says he does not mind the association with the First City Command, which he likens to "a club or a guild."

   He is so confident of victory in the October 2002 election, in fact, that he boasts that he has no plans to campaign or to spend money on posters, fliers or bumper stickers. "I figure that every prisoner has at least three people in his family who are voters," he said.

Extraído do "New York Times" de 09/09/01

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