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This report is the result of ongoing research on police violence performed by the staff of our Rio de Janeiro, Brazil office from December 1995 through March 1997. Research for the report included several missions to São Paulo, two to Natal, two to Recife, Salvador, and Belo Horizonte, and one Mission to Porto Alegre. The report was written by James Cavallaro, our Brazil office director and edited by Anne Manuel, deputy director of Human Rights Watch/Americas. The following staff in our Brazil office provided significant assistance in the research and writing of this report: Anna Monteiro (research and press assistant), Gustavo Pacheco (attorney), Ricardo Lima (law intern, Harvard Law School) Florian Hoffman (graduate student intern, Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro), Dara McDaniel (law intern, Australian National University), and Simone Rocha (journalist). Human Rights Watch/Americas would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their assistance and cooperation in preparing this report: the staff of the Human Rights Commission of the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre), the Ombudsman for Police in São Paulo, Sandra Carvalho of the Teotônio Vilela Commission in São Paulo, the Human Rights Division of the public prosecutors office in Belo Horizonte, the Human Rights Commission of the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro, Daniel Aragão of the Justice and Peace Commission of Salvador, Bahia, the Office of Legal Support for Popular Organizations and the Dom Hélder Câmara Center in Recife, the Center for Human Rights and Popular Memory in Natal, and the Human Rights Commission of the Federal Chamber of Deputies in Brasilia. Human Rights Watch/Americas would also thank those state and federal government authorities that met with us and provided access to information concerning police violence.

`"These violent criminals have become animals . . . They are animals. They can't be understood any other way. That's why encounters with them can't be civilized. These people don't have to be treated in a civilized way. They have to be treated like animals."

- Marcello Alencar, governor of Rio de Janeiro state, May 11, 1995, three days after state civil police officers killed thirteen suspected drug traffickers in the Nova Brasília favela.

Since 1970, the number of Brazilian cities with populations over one million has grown from five to eleven. Rapid, unplanned growth of these urban centers has been accompanied in most cases by soaring crime rates and parallel public dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of the criminal justice system. As we document in this report, many authorities have responded to this public concern about criminality with policies that tolerate or promote grave violations of the rights of criminal suspects. This report considers the gravest of these violations-extrajudicial executions, near-fatal shootings, and forced disappearances of civilians-and the inadequate response of political, prosecutorial, and judicial authorities to these crimes.

This report focuses on seven cities, six of which are among Brazil's ten largest. Although significant differences may be noted both in the practice of police in these seven cities and states, as well as the role played by governmental authorities in responding to them, certain elements remain constant throughout. Police in Brazil's major urban areas often kill without justification. When they do so, they frequently file false reports describing extrajudicial executions as shootouts with dangerous criminal elements. In many cases, these homicidal police take the corpses of their victims to emergency rooms so that "first aid" may be administered. By removing bodies from the crime scene, in violation of Brazilian law, these police effectively undermine the possibility that experts will be able to investigate cases adequately. In some states, police continue the abhorrent practice of forced disappearances utilized under Brazil's former military regime. This practice, which usually includes an unacknowledged detention or failure to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the victim, followed by extrajudicial execution and secret disposal of the corpse, is an aberration which should be immediately eradicated by Brazilian authorities.

The police, ordinarily responsible for the initial inquiries into their own crimes, rarely investigate police killings with diligence. Once transferred to prosecutors, these poorly documented cases are almost never given priority. When presented with indictments, Brazilian courts, particularly those in the military justice system, fail to fulfill their legal obligation to convict and sentence violent police. Bias against criminal suspects is nearly as pervasive in the courts as on police forces and in society at large. As one judge wrote in acquitting police officers charged with torturing several detainees and abducting another, "These so-called human rights exist only to protect criminals from the law, when in truth they should exist to protect the honest citizen from the actions of crooks."

In several states, authorities charged with overseeing public security have adopted policies that appear to actually foster human rights abuse. For example, in Rio de Janeiro, in November 1995, the state governor signed a decree authorizing salary bonuses for officers demonstrating "bravery." At the same time, the secretary of public security revived a dormant provision that allows for promotions of police involved in acts of bravery. In practice, these bonuses and promotions have been used to reward officers that have killed criminal suspects, regardless of the circumstances. We examined ninety-two incidents resulting in recommendations for promotion between 1995 and 1996. In those instances of "bravery," Rio de Janeiro military police killed seventy-two civilians while suffering six deaths. According to press sources, these policies have led to a six-fold increase in the number of civilians killed by military police in the city of Rio. Faced with criticism from nongovernmental organizations, Secretary of Public Security Gen. Nilton Cerqueira has assailed his detractors as fronts for drug traffickers.

A special commission formed within the Rio Grande do Norte state prosecutor's office and the Human Rights Commission of the lower house of the federal Congress reported in July and August 1995 respectively that Deputy Secretary of Public Security Maurílio Pinto de Medeiros supervised a death squad within the state civil police. Nonetheless, authorities maintained Pinto de Medeiros in his position as the effective chief of the state's police force for more than a year after the release of those reports. This support for Pinto de Medeiros-already indicted for his role in several crimes-fostered the impression that violent police would not be punished in Rio Grande do Norte. It was only after human rights lawyer Francisco Gilson Nogueira de Carvalho was killed by machine-gun fire in Macaíba, Rio Grande do Norte, on October 20, 1996, that Pinto de Medeiros was finally suspended from his post. Nogueira had been actively investigating the participation of local police in the death squad reportedly coordinated by Pinto de Medeiros.

At the same time, various state authorities have launched encouraging efforts to address the problem of police violence. In São Paulo, the secretary of public security has implemented a program to remove temporarily from active duty police officers involved in killings and to provide them with psychological counseling. The secretary has also established an ombudsman's office to hear complaints of police violence. In Belo Horizonte, the public prosecutor's office has established a special division to prosecute human rights violations. That division has indicted nearly 500 officers for abuse of authority and causing bodily injury-the crimes for which police officers who engage in torture can be prosecuted under Brazil's penal code. In Pernambuco, the state government has provided financial support for a witness protection program run by one of the state's leading nongovernmental organizations. In several cases examined in this report, authorities have succeeded in prosecuting police responsible for extrajudicial killings. While clearly the exception, these cases illustrate that the cycle of impunity can be broken, particularly in those instances in which nongovernmental organizations serve as assistants to the prosecution or otherwise press authorities to prosecute violent police.

This report concludes that impunity-the product of the combined failure of a number of Brazilian institutions-is the single factor that most contributes to the continuation of abusive police practices. The report also highlights a series of measures, detailed below, that have helped to reduce the incidence of police violence in Brazil and elsewhere, and which offer the promise of a less violent future.

On May 13, 1996, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso released the National Human Rights Plan (the Plan), a comprehensive set of more than 200 measures intended to address a broad range of human rights problems in Brazil. The Plan was the result of eight months of joint efforts by the Ministry of Justice and nongovernmental organizations, human rights advocates, and other members of civil society.

The Plan includes several measures that we support and which we believe are critical to ending the problem of impunity for police violence. However, virtually all of the measures in the Plan require passage by both houses of the Brazilian Congress before they take effect. Many of the measures in the Plan address the problem of police violence, including the criminalization of torture, the transfer of jurisdiction to ordinary courts for crimes committed by military police officers and the extension of federal jurisdiction over grave human rights crimes. At this writing, however, except for legislation transferring a limited set of cases from the military to the ordinary justice system, none of these measures had passed both houses of Congress.

Recommendations

1. Prosecute Violent Police Officers

Serious abuses by police forces should be promptly and vigorously investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the international standards codified in the United Nations' Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extralegal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions. Neither the importance of the law enforcement objectives nor political considerations should obstruct efforts to ensure that state agents who abuse civilians are brought to justice. As of this writing, investigations into numerous cases of unjustified police killings of civilians remained stalled or have been dismissed. Human Rights Watch/Americas calls on Brazil's political, prosecutorial, and judicial authorities to insist on accountability for abuses and to ensure that investigations and prosecutions proceed expeditiously and with all the necessary resources.

2. Establish Federal Jurisdiction for Human Rights Crimes

The federal government should assume direct responsibility for prosecuting serious cases of human rights violations by state police. As this report shows, state authorities have a poor record of prosecuting state police officials for crimes against civilians. The federal courts have proven less vulnerable to political pressures to acquit law enforcement agents who commit abuses.

There are several avenues available to establish federal jurisdiction over human rights crimes. One proposal pending in Brazil's Congress calls for expanding the authority of the Federal Council for the Defense of the Rights of the Human Person (Conselho de Defesa dos Direitos da Pessoa Humana, CDDPH), which currently operates under the Ministry of Justice. This legislation would authorize the CDDPH, among other powers, to determine which cases should be investigated by federal police and prosecuted in the federal courts.

Another means of enhancing federal authority in the area of human rights abuse involves the determination, per se, of cases over which the federal government would retain authority to investigate and prosecute. We support the federalization of violent crimes that violate international human rights norms in which initial investigations indicate the participation of police officers. However, if crimes of police violence are federalized as a class, it is critical that adequate resources be devoted to the federal authorities who will be charged with their prosecution. At present, the federal police force in Brazil consists of 5,000 agents and 7,000 employees, including administrative personnel. Federal prosecutors number approximately 400 in all of Brazil. These numbers are not sufficient to handle the additional caseload that federalization of determined crimes implies.

3. Independently Investigate Police Misconduct

The current method of police investigation of crimes committed by police is perhaps the single factor that most facilitates impunity. Revised procedures should include the following elements:

* Investigations by the Public Prosecutors' Office

The public prosecutors' offices should routinely investigate credible allegations of police violence without having to rely on the police to take witness statements, visit the scene of the crime, or provide other technical support. Brazil's constitution allows the public prosecutors' offices to proceed with criminal investigations even if a police inquiry is not opened. In practice, however, prosecutors rarely undertake such investigations independently. Human Rights Watch/Americas calls on the Attorney General and the chiefs of the public prosecutor's office in each of Brazil's states to order prosecutors to make use of their constitutional powers to investigate and prosecute cases of police violence. Moreover, we recommend that legislation be enacted to require such independent investigations whenever police are implicated in killings, torture, or forced disappearance.

* Create Independent Investigators within the Public Prosecutors' Offices

Brazilian authorities should enact legislation that would create a staff of investigators within the public prosecutors' offices. These investigators would be authorized to subpoena documents, summons witnesses, and enter the premises of police facilities in order to conduct thorough and independent investigations.

* Establish Special Human Rights Divisions within the Public Prosecutors' Offices

Human Rights Divisions should be created within the public prosecutors' offices in each state to pursue investigations of crimes committed by police. As documented in this report, in the instances in which such special subdivisions have been established on either a permanent or ad hoc basis, they have played critical roles in bringing abusive police officers to justice. We urge state governments to establish these human rights subdivisions, and to provide them with an adequate number of prosecutors trained in the area of human rights.

* Make Technical Experts Independent

In the overwhelming majority of Brazilian states, the coroner's office (Instituto Médico Legal, IML), and other experts, such as ballistic analysts, are subordinated to the police department or to the secretary of public security who controls the police. As a result of this lack of independence, mandatory examinations of detainees are often not performed and medical examinations, including autopsies, are often not carried out with sufficient detail, particularly in cases in which the victims are suspected of involvement with drug trafficking or other criminal behavior. If the IML were independent of the police, the public prosecutors' offices could more effectively supervise police investigations by comparing police reports with coroner's reports. The independence of the IML is also critical to the maintenance of accurate statistics on homicides, because it would allow police data on lethal use of force to be cross-checked with IML figures on the cause and manner of death in cases when police kill civilians.

4. Eliminate Military Jurisdiction over Crimes Against Civilians

The prosecution before military tribunals of police and armed forces personnel accused of abuses against civilians facilitates impunity. Brazil's military courts, each composed of four military officers and one civilian judge, have rarely convicted government forces in cases of human rights violations against civilians. Civilian courts should be given jurisdiction over all cases involving murder, torture, or other serious human rights abuses of civilians by police officers or armed forces personnel. Legislation recently passed by the Brazilian Congress and signed into law by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso shifts jurisdiction to the ordinary courts in cases of murder (homicídio doloso), a positive, albeit limited step. Unfortunately, this allows the military police to retain control of the initial police inquiry, a provision which may preclude serious and independent investigations.

5. Codify the Crime of Torture

Legislation must be passed to codify the crime of torture, in accordance with Brazil's obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty ratified by Brazil in 1989. Article 4.1 of that treaty requires that governments make all acts of torture "offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature." At present, the only criminal offenses applicable to torture are lesão corporal (bodily harm), the same offense committed when one person punchesanother, and abuse of authority, if the offender is a police officer. These crimes carry minimal penalties. Codifying the crime of torture with appropriate penalties would demonstrate the government's firm rejection of human rights abuse as a police practice. At this writing, bill number 4.716/95, which criminalizes the crime of torture, is pending before the Senate's Justice Commission, having already passed the lower house of Congress. We urge the Senate to pass this or similar legislation to criminalize torture swiftly.

6. Create Ombudsmen/Human Rights Councils

Human Rights Watch/Americas has long supported the creation of civilian review boards to oversee the police and receive complaints of police abuse in Brazil and elsewhere, including the United States. We are encouraged by recent efforts in the state of São Paulo, where the secretary of public security has established an ombudsman (ouvidoria) to receive and follow complaints of police abuse. State legislatures should promote legislation to establish such ombudsman's offices as permanent institutions. These institutions should be given full subpoena powers, and should be allowed to enter police facilities to conduct examinations as required for their investigations.

7. Protect Witnesses

Many witnesses to police abuse are afraid to testify for fear of retaliation. A comprehensive national program to protect witnesses by permitting their geographic relocation with altered identities is essential. Legislation is currently pending in the Brazilian Congress that would create a federal witness protection program.

Until a comprehensive federal program has been established, Human Rights Watch/Americas encourages the development of witness protection programs at the state level. In this regard, an instructive example is the witness protection program jointly run by the Office of Legal Assistance for Popular Organizations (Gabinete de Assessoria Jurídica às Organizações Populares, GAJOP), a Recife-based non-governmental organization (NGO) and the government of the state of Pernambuco. The Ministry of Justice, GAJOP, and the United Nations Development Program plan to sign an agreement in early 1997 to implement similar programs in five other states. All states should implement similar programs to protect witnesses to incidents of police violence, among other crimes in which prosecution has traditionally failed due to the unwillingness of witnesses to testify.

8. Impose Administrative Discipline

Notoriously abusive policemen should be removed administratively from the force or, at the very least, suspended from active duty until criminal charges have been resolved. At a minimum, police accused of homicide should be placed on unarmed duty until investigations are completed. The practice, followed in several states, of waiting for the courts to convict officers before removing them administratively should be abandoned. In addition to prosecuting abusive police officers criminally, police internal affairs divisions should carry out vigorous reviews to identify and discipline police officers who engage in abusive conduct or who fail to take appropriate action to prevent or uncover criminal conduct by others. Since 1995, the São Paulo police have instituted a program designed to identify police involved in incidents of homicide and remove them, at least temporarily, from street duty. This program appears to have caused a significant reduction in the rate of police killings and should be implemented in other Brazilian states as well.

The Brazilian Constitution contains at least two provisions (art. 41, sec. 1 and art. 42, sec. 7 and sec. 8) that guarantee tenure to certain civil servants, both military and non-military, even despite convictions entered against them. These provisions have been interpreted in such a way as to undermine legitimate efforts to dismiss abusive police officers. To the extent that the Brazilian Constitution guarantees police officers their positions notwithstanding their involvement in grave human rights violations, it should be amended. Police officers are public servants who must be subject to removal for violation of basic human rights.

9. Modify the Appointment of Assistants to the Prosecution

One of the ways in which Brazilian NGOs have pressed for prosecutions in homicides committed by police is by acting, when they have the consent of the families, as assistants to the prosecution (assistente da acusação). However, these NGOs are not permitted to intervene when the victims of violence are not identified, or when the family members, fearing reprisals, do not authorize them to act as assistants. The Brazilian Congress should approve legislation empowering non-governmental organizations to act as assistants to the prosecution, in appropriate circumstances, without requiring the authorization from the family of the victim.

10. Control Deadly Force

Authorities should take decisive steps to ensure police agents use deadly force only as a last resort to protect life. Deadly force should not be used to control oreliminate persons simply because they are seen as undesirable or involved in criminal activity, nor should it be used when uninvolved third parties will be unnecessarily endangered. Brazilian police should respect international standards in this regard. In particular, the United Nations' Basic Principles on the Use of Force or Firearms by Law Enforcement Official provides that "Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting authority or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life" (Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, U.N. Doc.E/AC.57/DEC/11/119, 1990, Annex, Paragraph 9 (Special Provisions), p. 146.)

11. Control Firearms Discharges

Police forces-both civil and military-must keep tighter controls on the use of firearms. One means of guaranteeing a rigorous control is to require that an incident report be filed for each weapon discharge. Such a reporting requirement would underscore the extremely grave nature of firearm use and discourage the careless and criminal use of weapons.

12. Absolutely Prohibit the Use of Non-Official Weapons

It is critical that police authorities be able to control the use of firearms by their subordinates. Under no circumstances should police be authorized to carry firearms not registered to the police department while on duty. In prior reports, Human Rights Watch/Americas has documented cases in which non-official weapons were placed on victims to create the appearance of a shootout. Moreover, shots fired from these weapons may never be traced to a particular officer's gun, thus enhancing the possibility that unlawful police killings remain unpunished.

13. Discourage Armed Encounters

Public security policies should discourage armed conflicts with criminal suspects. Bravery should only be rewarded when police officers face grave risk to protect human life, without killing. As currently implemented in Rio de Janeiro, the promotion and the pay bonus for bravery invite abuse by providing police with incentives to execute criminal suspects rather than arrest them in accordance withthe law. Programs that confuse bravery with summary executions are irresponsible and dangerous. We urge Gov. Marcello Alencar to limit bravery incentives to actions in which no civilians are killed.

14. Provide More Intensive Training

Nongovernmental organizations concur with many chiefs of civil police forces, commanders of state military police forces, and secretaries of public security we interviewed on the need for enhanced police training. In several states, recruits begin service as armed, uniformed police after only three months at a police academy. The training necessary to convert a high school graduate into a public servant equipped to enforce the law is intensive and time consuming. State authorities must not let their interest in economizing or in filling vacancies abbreviate the requisite training process. One area of particular concern is weapons training. Before being entrusted with firearms, including machine guns, police officers should undergo intensive training and should be required to pass rigorous standardized tests of proficiency.

Ensure Training in Non-Lethal Means of Controlling Dangerous Situations:

Police work is necessarily fraught with life-threatening situations. In many of these situations, the only means of avoiding the loss of life is through the employment of deadly force. However, in many others, less violent methods of arresting armed and dangerous suspects may be employed. Brazilian police must be trained in the use of non-lethal methods and encouraged to employ those methods.

15. Pay Higher Salaries for Police Officers

Police work demands an enormous personal and psychological commitment and also provides innumerable opportunities for graft and corruption. All these factors weigh in favor of paying police officers a salary that is commensurate with the responsibilities and risks that come with the job. In many states considered in this report, officers beginning careers in the police earn less than U.S. $ 300 per month.

Pay raises must be accompanied by intensive internal review procedures designed to eliminate violent and corrupt officers from police forces.

16. Gather and Publish Data on Abuses

As urged previously by Human Rights Watch/Americas, public authorities in some states have begun to compile and make available data on homicides by police. Those states which have not made these figures available should do so immediately. In addition, authorities should gather and organize data on a precinct-by-precinct basis to facilitate more detailed review of police conduct. Authorities should also periodically inform the public regarding the number of administrative and criminal investigations of alleged police abuse that are underway and the status and disposition of those cases.

17. Seek International Assistance to Reform Justice and Police Systems

The international community should assist Brazil with the fight against violence by funding programs to improve the police, prosecutorial, and judicial systems. Particular attention should go to establishing a nationwide system of monitoring police violence and of evaluating the response of the public prosecutors' offices and the judiciary to this violence. This system should maintain accurate records of such crucial information as the number of reported incidents of torture and homicides committed by the police, the number of police inquiries successfully concluded, and the percentage of police convicted. Funds could also be targeted to assist several of the reforms suggested by Human Rights Watch/Americas, such as witness protection programs (as the United Nations Development Program has recently done) and special oversight commissions (ouvidorias) designated to receive complaints of police violence. These programs should establish concrete goals and guidelines to assure that the funds are used to produce concrete results.

The present report is Human Rights Watch/Americas' broadest to date on the problem of police violence in Brazil, addressing police homicides in seven Brazilian cities. In prior reports we have compared police violence in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo,1 addressed police violence in Rio de Janeiro alone,2 and considered police and death squad violence against adolescents in four Brazilian states.3 The seven cities chosen for this report represent three of the major regions of Brazil-the south (Porto Alegre), the southeast (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte), and the northeast (Salvador, Recife, Natal), and illustrate the national nature of the problem of police violence. Six of the cities are among Brazil's largest urban centers, each with a population in excess of one millioninhabitants. We included a smaller city, Natal, due to the extremely severe problem of police violence in that northeastern state capitol.

Police violence is by no means limited to these seven cities. Urban police violence also affects the capital cities in the Amazon region of Brazil. In 1996, reports of death squads with ties to state police surfaced in Rio Branco, Acre, and in Manaus, Amazonas. The group in Rio Branco was reportedly coordinated by the state's highest elected officials. The group in Manaus is said to have killed more than twenty people including a state prosecutor in the months of May and June.4

Public Security Policies and Police Violence

Human Rights Watch's experience throughout the Americas and in other areas of the world has demonstrated that police violence is not an inevitable response to criminality, nor is it irrevocably linked to poverty or unequal wealth distribution. Without doubt, poverty and social injustice are important factors that help explain the context in which police violence arises, but cannot alone explain significant differences in the incidence of police abuse, not only among nations, but also among the political subdivisions within given nations. In this regard, the recent experience of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is illustrative; different policies in these two states have produced vastly different results in the area of police violence and its control. In São Paulo, throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Human Rights Watch/Americas documented a steady increase in the rate of civilians killed by on-duty military police officers. During this period, Rio de Janeiro state authorities did not release figures on the number of civilians killed by police, thus rendering a precise numerical comparison impossible. However, other indicators suggested that São Paulo police were killing civilians at a rate substantially higher than their Rio de Janeiro counterparts. Indeed, by 1992-the record year for military police killings in São Paulo-the number of civilians that these police killed reached 1,470, one-third of the total number of homicides in the state of São Paulo that year. By way of comparison with another notoriously violent city, the São Paulo figure represents more than sixty-one times the number of civilians-twenty-four-that the New York City police killed in 1992, and more than fifteen times the number of police killings per capita when compared with New York.

The watershed mark in the escalation of military police violence in São Paulo was the incident at the Carandiru (Casa de Detenção) prison on October 2, 1992. On that date, a riot broke out in Pavilion Nine of the prison. After a cursory attempt to dialogue with the prisoners, military police shock troops stormed the prison and killed 111 detainees. Subsequent investigations demonstrated that the police summarily executed dozens of their victims, many after they had been forced to strip naked and return to their cells. In the aftermath of the Carandiru massacre, in large part due to the pressure exerted by Brazilian and international human rights organizations and the domestic and international press, São Paulo authorities took significant steps to reduce the shocking rate of police homicides. In 1993, the number of civilians killed by the military police, according to official figures, fell from 1,470 to approximately 400, demonstrating how attitudes at the top could affect events on the street.

In the past few years, São Paulo authorities have taken further steps to control the violence of the military police. One of the first measures adopted by Secretary of Public Security José Afonso da Silva upon taking office in January 1995 was the temporary removal of police officers involved in repeated instances of homicide. Reviewing the records of active military police, Secretary da Silva found that some 200 military police warranted such removal based on repeated allegations of involvement in homicides. Secretary da Silva explained to Human Rights Watch/Americas that in many cases he would have liked to dismiss violent officers from the police force.5 However, article 42 of the Brazilian Constitution guarantees tenure to officers (including those in the military police) despite valid convictions until they are dismissed by the appropriate military tribunal.6

Another important measure in the battle to curb police violence in São Paulo was the creation of an ombudsman (ouvidoria) to hear complaints of police abuse. The appointment of long-time human rights activist Benedito Domingos Mariano of the human rights group Centro Santo Dias of the Archdiocese of São Paulo demonstrated that Secretary da Silva was serious about his commitment to the ombudsman's office. In its first six months the ombudsman's office responded to 1,241 complaints, including 246 complaints of police violence. In its 1997 annual evaluation of human rights practices around the world, the U.S. Department of State credited the ombudsman's office with increasing the number of internalcriminal investigations opened by the São Paulo police from an annual average of some forty to more than one hundred between November 1995 and June 1996.7

Largely as a result of these programs, the number of civilians killed by the military police in the state of São Paulo has continued to fall, dropping from roughly 500 in 1995 to slightly over one hundred for the first six months of 1996.

By contrast, authorities in Rio de Janeiro have implemented a series of policies that have produced a dramatic increase in killings committed by the military police. Among the most worrisome of these public policies are the "bravery promotion" and the "bravery pay bonus." Under the terms of these two programs, officers who engage in acts of "bravery" are eligible for pay raises and promotions. In practice, however, evidence suggests at a minimum that "bravery" is often confused with the summary execution of criminal suspects, frequently referred to in Brazil as "marginais" (lowlifes or crooks).

The practical result of these policies is evident. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, press figures based on analysis of police reports noted a nearly six-fold increase in the number of civilians killed by military police from just over three (3.2) per month to more than twenty (20.55) per month since Gen. Nilton Cerqueira took over as head of the police in the State of Rio de Janeiro in May 1995. According to press sources, from January 1995 through February 1996, the military police killed 201 people in the city of Rio.8 The Ninth Battalion alone killed seventy-five civilians in one seven-month period from August 1995 through February 1996, roughly four times the number of civilians killed by police in New York during a comparable period of time.9 Examination of the police and coroners' reports in many of these cases suggest that rather than shoot-outs, these are cases of summary executions.

Nonetheless, Secretary Cerqueira defends the measure as a means of promoting "productivity" among his police forces. In an August 1996 interview, General Cerqueira refused to consider our recommendation that the pay raise and promotion for bravery only be available in cases with no civilian fatalities. Cerqueira told Human Rights Watch/Americas during that interview that "crooks are not civilians" and that "crooks are crooks, dead or alive."10

The Scope of this Report

The cases documented in this report vary in nature in several ways. First, although many of the cases are quite recent, a number of others profiled here occurred five or more years ago. In order to analyze the success and failure of the justice system in prosecuting these cases, it was necessary to include cases that have passed through all phases of prosecution. The inclusion and analysis of these cases are critical in light of the key role that impunity-the failure on the part of authorities to investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible-plays in the continued commission of grave offenses. In many of the cases documented in this report, despite significant publicity and pressure from local and international human rights groups, prosecutions drag on without success. For instance, in one case documented in the chapter on Salvador, on January 25, 1990, a group of ten military police detained two youths, aged fifteen and seventeen, whom they mistook for gang members. The police forced the youths to lie down on the asphalt, beat and tortured them, mutilated their bodies, amputated their genitals, and finally executed both with three gun shots each. Despite pressure from the federal public prosecutor's office and local human rights groups, the case has yet to come to trial after seven years.

However, in a minority of cases, particularly those in which nongovernmental organizations pressured local authorities, violent police have been successfully brought to justice. Under Brazilian law, the relatives of homicide victims may designate attorneys to serve as assistants to the prosecution, who are then authorized to participate in criminal proceedings. In Recife, for example, the diligent efforts of two leading nongovernmental organizations as special assistants to the prosecution have helped produce results in important cases of police violence detailed in this report.

Types of Cases of Police Violence Documented

The chapters that follow document four roughly defined categories of police homicides and near-fatal shootings. A fifth category involves instances in which persons detained by police officers subsequently "disappeared" from official custody under circumstances that justify the presumption of police responsibility. The first subset involves police use of deadly force in the course of massive raids into favelas (shantytowns). These raids, according to official versions, are often designed to carry out legitimate police actions, such as the apprehension of criminal suspects or preventive sweeps.11 In the course of these operations, however, police have repeatedly engaged in unjustified fatal shootings of criminal suspects.

A second subset of cases documented in this report involves individual instances of police killings that suggest, at least, the inappropriate use of deadly force. Although police incident reports of these shootings-often in the form of a police "resisting arrest form" (auto de resistência)-invariably present accounts of lawful police response to the unlawful use of deadly force by the victims, these incidents are often poorly disguised extrajudicial executions.

Another common form of extrajudicial executions reported in the pages that follow results from the use of extremely excessive force to respond to potentially criminal, though not life-threatening situations. In these instances, the use of deadly force violates both Brazilian and international law. Nonetheless, authorities charged with investigating these cases rarely impose criminal or even administrative sanctions on offending officers.

In still another sub-category of cases, police kill while off-duty, either to resolve personal vendettas or in response to some minor provocation or inconvenience. Although police authorities rarely treat these cases as incidents of their concern (more than one police chief told Human Rights Watch/Americas that off-duty police killings were not considered by internal disciplinary boards), we include several such cases in this report due to our conviction that off-duty police killings of civilians must be treated as problems that result from inadequate control of police forces. Official failure to investigate and prosecute vigorously off-duty police violence stimulates further official lawlessness. This presents a public danger and a threat to the security and human rights of all citizens.12

Finally, another extremely worrisome category of cases treated in this report are those in which criminal suspects "disappear" from police custody. In these cases, police typically detain criminal suspects who are brought to precincts for processing, only to later claim the detainee escaped. In several cases documented in this report, evidence suggests this story has been devised to cover up an extrajudicial execution and prevent an investigation into the death.13

During the military dictatorship (1964-1985), Brazilian security forces forcibly disappeared at least 136 persons whose bodies were never found. Close to 200 others were summarily executed for political motives or killed while in state custody. In recent years, "disappearance" has resurfaced as a security force practice, now employed against common criminal suspects. This report examines several cases of "disappearance" from the state of Minas Gerais and its capital, Belo Horizonte as well as a case from Rio de Janeiro. Local human rights organizations and press reports suggest this practice occurs in other parts of Brazil as well, including the northeastern state of Alagoas.

The Police Process and Criminal Procedure in Brazil

Police in Brazil are organized primarily at the state, rather than the national or local level. Although Brazil does have a federal police force, as well as specialized federal police authorities for highways, railways, and ports of entry, the Brazilian Constitution assigns responsibility for the vast majority of criminal activity to state police forces. The duties of the federal police, a relatively small force, include prevention of interstate and international drug trafficking and smuggling, protecting Brazil's borders, and exercising the functions of a federal judicial police (executing arrest warrants for those indicted on federal offenses, for example).14 In Brazil, the state police are divided into two nearly autonomous entities, the civiland military police.15 Both forces are under the control of the state governor, though the military police are also auxiliary and reserve units of the army. The two police forces are divided along functional lines. The military police is a uniformed force that patrols the streets, maintains public order, and may arrest suspects caught in the act of committing crimes (although in practice, they arrest suspects beyond this legitimate legal basis). Under Brazilian law, criminal suspects may only be arrested if they are caught in the act of committing a crime (in flagrante delicto) or pursuant to an arrest warrant issued by a judge.16 It is usually the military police who respond to crimes while they are in progress; the civil police investigate crimes once they have occurred. Once the military police arrest a suspect they are required to transport him to the appropriate civil police precinct (delegacia) for processing. At this point, the military police ordinarily have no further participation in the related criminal investigation. The civil police are authorized to perform investigations, and in practice, oversee the operation of precincts. Each precinct is run by a precinct chief or delegado, who by law, must hold a law degree. In some rural areas, however, these police precinct chiefs have no legal training.

A police inquiry (inquérito policial), conducted by the civil police, may be initiated by written orders of the appropriate police authority de oficio, at the request of the victim or the offended party, or by orders of the judge or the public prosecutor's office. Inquiries must be opened whenever the police are informed of a possible violation of the penal code.17

Once an investigation is opened, the police must collect as many facts as possible about the crime, conduct all necessary examinations of the crime site, and, if there is enough evidence, state who they think is responsible. The police must take a statement from the victim and may undertake any investigations that they deem necessary, including interviewing witnesses and collecting physical evidence of the crime. Searches of homes may only occur by written orders of the judge with jurisdiction over the matter, and must occur during daytime. The prosecutor can require the police to conduct additional investigations at any time.18

The civil police have thirty days to conclude an investigation if no one is being held in detention, and ten days if a suspect has been arrested.19 If this time limit is exceeded, the judge (usually at the request of the prosecutor) can extend the investigation for an additional thirty days. In practice, the time limits established by law for the completion of the inquiry are virtually never met. The cases documented in this report include numerous instances in which police inquiries were delayed for months and even years. Whether intentionally or not, these delays render successful prosecution extremely difficult. Under Brazilian law, if a person is not convicted within a certain period of time after the beginning of criminal proceedings, the statute of limitations runs, and the state may no longer punish the offender. This time period varies according to the severity of the crime. The initiation of criminal proceedings against a defendant does not stop ("toll") the statute of limitations. Thus, because the passage of time benefits the accused, police and other authorities not interested in prosecuting violent police need only delay procedural steps to guarantee the impunity of the accused.

Once the police have concluded their investigations they must deliver a detailed written report to the judge. This report is passed on to the prosecutor to determine whether a suspect should be indicted (denunciado). An indictment (denúncia) may be issued whenever the prosecutor determines there is sufficient prima facie evidence to so justify. If the prosecutor or the judge believe that further police investigations are necessary, they may order them. Police investigations may only be shelved (arquivado) by order of the judge, ordinarily at the request of the prosecutor.

In the case of homicides, the prosecutor's indictment may be rejected by the judge if he or she determines that insufficient proof of the existence of a crime (materialidade) or individual responsibility (autoria) has been presented. In the case of homicide in the ordinary courts, on submission of an indictment, the judge may order that a case proceed to a trial, which under Brazilian law is held before a jury composed of seven citizens. In this case, the judge issues an indictment (pronúncia). In this report, we refer to the initial indictment submitted by the prosecutor as the prosecutorial indictment or simply the indictment. The indictment that has been ratified by the judge we term the judicial indictment.

Police Violence and Impunity

Perhaps the factor that most fuels police violence against criminal suspects and others is the persistent impunity that prevails for those officers who commit grave human rights abuses against this class of victims. Impunity results from the general inefficiency of the Brazilian judicial system, compounded by several important factors that come into play when the victims are poor favela residents with possible involvement in crime and the suspects are police.

One important factor that promotes police impunity is the legacy of violence that continues to shape the prevailing ethos within the police. This legacy of violence is particularly acute within certain divisions of the military police. During Brazil's military dictatorship the military police were under the direct control of the army. Specialized mobile "shock units," such as the São Paulo military police's Tobias de Aguiar Patrol Squad (Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar, ROTA), were established to prevent "terrorism" and wage urban war against subversives.20 These battalions remained in operation after politically motivated armed dissent was crushed, though control of the military police has, at least nominally, reverted to the democratically elected state governors. In addition to maintaining the military police shock units after the dictatorship, as a result of a 1979 amnesty law no army or military police personnel were prosecuted for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship. Consequently, abusive policemen remained on the force.

The existence of a specialized military justice system has in many ways contributed to the impunity afforded crimes committed by uniformed police officers. In October 1969, the military government established rules of procedure for these specialized tribunals, charging them with primary responsibility for prosecuting common crimes committed by military police officers.21 The 1988 Constitution preserved this separate system of criminal justice, instituted under the dictatorship, for the discipline of military police.22 A 1969 decree-still in force-provides that all crimes committed by military police while on duty and those crimes committed by military police while off-duty but with weaponsregistered to the military police, are military crimes.23 As a result, incidents of police violence ranging from beatings to torture and manslaughter fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the military courts.

As we have noted in past reports, the military justice system is administered in such a way as to make convictions of policemen for violent crimes against civilians almost impossible. Crimes committed by military policemen are investigated by the military police themselves who, not surprisingly, almost always determine that homicides were the result of shoot-outs.24 In addition, the military justice system is over-burdened and inefficient. Despite the best efforts of prosecutors, who are frequently serious and committed professionals, they are so overloaded that cases are effectively buried in the system. It is not uncommon for homicide prosecutions to take ten years in military courts. Crimes such as abuse of authority or assault are frequently not prosecuted at all, as the statute of limitations often runs out before the case comes to trial. As a result, military justice prosecutors often do not even bother to file cases less serious than homicide, leaving them completely immune from prosecution. (These same delays also undermine prosecutions in ordinary courts, although the situation is generally considered less severe.)

On August 7, 1996, President Cardoso signed into law a bill that shifts jurisdiction to ordinary courts in cases of murder by military police and soldiers.25 The final legislation, a substantially modified version of a bill that sought to shift jurisdiction to civilian courts for all non-military offenses committed by military personnel and police, represents a step in the right direction. However, all crimes less serious than murder committed by military police against civilians-including manslaughter (homicídio culposo)-will remain in the military justice system. Further, the initial determination of whether a killing may be characterized as murder rather than manslaughter remains in the hands of the military policeinvestigators.26 These factors limit significantly the potential impact of the legislation in reducing impunity.

In the case of crimes committed by both military and civil police, the path to impunity is often traced from the act of police violence itself. After killing a suspect or suspects, police often take their victims to nearby hospitals to receive "first aid." This practice undermines investigation of the crime scene, while promoting the appearance of police concern for the well-being of their shooting victims. In Rio de Janeiro, in dozens of instances which resulted in promotions, police officers brought victims of shootings to local hospitals, where they were pronounced dead. In July 1996, Dr. Maria Emília Amaral, director of the Souza Aguiar Hospital in downtown Rio, reported that in a period of twenty days police had brought ten dead bodies to her hospital's emergency room. Dr. Amaral wrote to Secretary of Public Security Nilton Cerqueira requesting that he order his police to stop their practice of delivering corpses to the emergency area of the hospital for first aid.27

Several cases documented in this and prior reports involve this practice, including the May 1995 massacre in the Nova Brasilia favela. In that incident, despite newspaper photographs and television images of police officers dumping obviously dead bodies onto the back of a sanitation truck, these same officers in their statements explained in the police inquiry that they had brought the victims to the hospital to receive first aid. As this report was being prepared, the public prosecutors' office had not brought charges against these police.

A study performed by Rio de Janeiro criminal judge Sérgio Verani analyzing dozens of cases of police killings over the course of two decades describes how the path to impunity often begins with the decision to complete a "resisting arrest form" rather than immediately opening an inquiry into the homicide committed bypolice. This form, designed for instances in which individuals resist lawful arrest orders, is employed to shift responsibility from the police to the deceased:

The procedure adopted by police authorities, in the situation analyzed, is uniform: instead of arresting the police officers responsible for the homicide in flagrante, a "resisting arrest form" is completed, and the matter is closed. A police inquiry is opened which investigates and verifies nothing, since generally the police who signed the resisting arrest form are heard [as witnesses]. No one is indicted. When someone is indicted, it is the victim himself.28

When a resisting arrest form is not employed (and, in some cases even when it is), the next step toward impunity is the police inquiry. In instances of police violence, as with all crimes, the police themselves oversee the inquiry into their abuses: both military and civil police investigate their own ranks. Predictably, these police inquiries are often cursory, intended to comply with a legal requirement, rather than to investigate and corroborate police misconduct or identify individual responsibility for abusive behavior. In numerous cases described below, police failed to undertake even the most basic measures in the course of the police inquiry. In these cases, as in others that we have documented in prior reports, few witnesses other than the police involved in the homicides were heard. Witnesses critical of the police version often simply were not interviewed. In many of the inquiries, however, serious efforts were made to determine the criminal background (if any) of the victim. Once having established that the victim was a "marginal," the investigations were effectively closed. Implicit in this procedure is the idea that the police may kill criminals without fear of any consequences. As a result of the routinely deficient nature of these investigations, among the most important recommendations included in this report is that the police not be permitted to oversee investigations into their own misconduct. Human Rights Watch/Americas believes that this initial investigative authority should be in the hands of the public prosecutors' office or a separate and more independent police force, such as the federal police.

Brazilian law permits prosecutors to perform their own investigations and to indict police officers involved in violent crime without having to wait for police toopen or to complete the policy inquiry.29 Indeed, this is precisely what a special subcommission of the public prosecutors' office in the state of Rio Grande do Norte did in mid-1995 in response to increasingly serious complaints of police violence in which the deputy secretary of public security was implicated. Similarly, the Human Rights Division of the public prosecutors' office in Belo Horizonte has indicted hundreds of police officers for involvement in torture and many others for homicide and forced disappearance usually without relying on police inquiries to investigate police misconduct. Unfortunately, many prosecutors do not consider police killings of criminal suspects a priority and, consequently, rarely investigate complaints of this practice unless presented with a completed police inquiry. While it may be difficult for a prosecutor to gather the evidence necessary to indict violent police without some level of police cooperation, a significant portion of the responsibility for the absence of indictments against homicidal police reflects the inaction or negligence of the state public prosecutors' offices.30

Another serious impediment to diligent investigation and prosecution of cases of police abuse is the lack of autonomy of forensic experts. In most Brazilian states, forensic pathologists are subordinate to the police, even though the Brazilian Society for Forensic Pathologists has supported independence for forensic pathologists since 1989. A recent example of the poor investigations done by these subordinated experts involves the July 1993 police massacre of twenty-one residents of the Vigário Geral favela in Rio de Janeiro. Three years after the killings, a judge ordered seventeen of the twenty-one victims' bodies exhumed. The October 7, 1996 exams performed on the exhumed corpses uncovered nine bullets and two fragments that the initial forensic team had failed to remove from the corpses prior to burial.31

The judiciary itself bears some responsibility for the impunity of abusive police officers. In many cases, even when all other obstacles have been overcome,judicial biases in favor of police violence favor impunity. This is particularly true in the military courts whose poor record of convicting officers that commit human rights violations is a matter of public record. Many ordinary court judges are also biased in favor of police, especially when their victims are common crime suspects.

Other problems undermining successful prosecution of violent police include the lack of adequate protection for witnesses and victims, who often suffer violent reprisal for daring to speak out.

Brazil's relatively limited witness protection programs are often run by the police themselves. The principal exception to this rule is the recently created Program of Support and Protection for Witnesses, Victims and Relatives of the Victims of Violence (Programa de Apoio e Proteção a Testemnunhas, Vítimas e Familiares de Vítimas da Violência, PROVITA) run by the prestigious Recife-based human rights group GAJOP in combination with the state government of Pernambuco. In its first year of existence, the PROVITA program has made it possible for numerous witnesses to come forward and denounce death squad, police, and organized criminal violence without fear of reprisals. At this writing, the Ministry of Justice, GAJOP, and the United Nations Development Program are moving towards the establishment of witness protection programs modeled on PROVITA in five other Brazilian states to be followed by the nationalization of the PROVITA program.32

Perhaps the most notable example of the failure of Brazilian authorities to protect witnesses of police violence adequately is the case of Wagner dos Santos, the key witness to the July 1993 police killing of eight sleeping street children in the downtown Rio de Janeiro's Candelária plaza. Dos Santos survived the initial massacre, despite being shot three times. Then, in December 1994, while living under the protection of the state-run Witness Safe House (Casa da Testemunha), dos Santos was attacked a second time. In this second attack, a group of off-duty military police officers allegedly forced dos Santos off a bus, and shot him several times. Miraculously, he survived. Shortly thereafter, dos Santos fled to Switzerland, where, with the assistance of Amnesty International, he remained until he appeared as the prosecution's star witness against the police officers responsible for the Candelária massacre.

One of the methods used by human rights organizations and those with sufficient economic resources to try to pressure Brazil's notoriously slow judicial system into quicker action is to designate an assistant to the prosecution. Brazilianlaw permits the victim or the immediate family to appoint a prosecution assistant. This individual (who could also be the victim) can propose arguments about the evidence, request questions to be put to witnesses, participate in the oral debate in the case, and participate in the appeals made by the public prosecutor's office or advance his or her own appeals.33 In the military justice system, however, the powers of the assistant to the prosecution are more limited. For example, only the public prosecutors' office is authorized to appeal decisions adverse to the prosecution.34

Brazilian human rights groups have used this tactic successfully to press for action in specific cases when the family of the victim has so requested. However, when the victim is a suspected criminal, the immediate family often lacks the interest or is too afraid to make effective use of the assistant to the prosecution figure. Because police killings present a threat to society as a whole and not merely the victim and his relatives, the Brazilian Congress should pass legislation authorizing nongovernmental organizations to participate as assistants to the prosecution regardless of whether the victim's family is willing-or financially able-to become involved by designating an assistant.

One of the clearest signs that impunity promotes police violence is the fact that a handful of violent police account for a significant portion of the total number of cases of police violence. In São Paulo, for example, our 1993 report on police violence highlighted the case of Gilson Lopes, a military police officer in that state involved in forty-four homicides, all of which were reported as shoot-outs and none of which resulted in disciplinary action against Lopes. Indeed, as the 1993 report noted, Lopes had been promoted within the ranks of the São Paulo military police. This report documents the cases of other abusive police officers who have been permitted to kill and torture with impunity. The chapter on Natal, Rio Grande do Norte State, focuses on Jorge Luis Fernandes, known locally as "Jorge Abafador" (Jorge the smotherer), who is allegedly involved in a dozen homicides. Interestingly, many of these homicides, though denounced to civil police authorities at the time of their commission, were investigated only after the public prosecutors' office created a special commission in response to the popular outcry that followed a March 1995 incident in which Fernandes killed two people and wounded three others. In 1995 in Rio de Janeiro, military police Lt. Marcelo Moreira led or participated in eleven police operations that claimed the lives of eighteen victims, all in purported shoot-outs. Moreira was recently promoted andcontinues to work in Rio's northern sector. In Belo Horizonte, civil police officer José Maria de Paula has been denounced for his involvement in several cases of torture and "disappearance" of detainees dating back to the military dictatorship and documented in the definitive study of the topic, Brasil Nunca Mais.35 De Paula's recent alleged involvement in several cases of "disappearance" and summary executions is documented in this report.

Other factors not directly within the control of the government also contribute to the prevalence of police violence. Among these is the popular support that violent police often receive from urban residents, worried about alarming rates of criminal violence in Brazil's major cities. As discussed in the first pages of the chapter on São Paulo, public outrage in the aftermath of the brutal killing of two young adults in a bar hold-up in an affluent neighborhood of São Paulo in August 1996, the police quickly detained nine young men who they contended were responsible for the killings. Two months later the prosecutor in the case released the young men, several of whom alleged having been brutally tortured, due to the lack of evidence against them other than their allegedly coerced confessions. Despite the revelation of the barbarities that the men suffered in detention and the weak case against them, many São Paulo residents opposed the men's release.36

Police Torture in Brazil

On July 2, 1996, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress approved legislation to criminalize torture, an obligation that Brazil had assumed internationally when it ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other CruelInhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1989.37 As the chamber was approving this legislation, security guards for that legislative body detained and severely beat Veja magazine salesman Severino de Araújo Maciel-to force him to sign a false confession-until he passed out nearly eight hours later. Indeed, Brazil's leading news magazine, Veja, termed such abuse "the Brazilian method of police investigation" in a November 1, 1995 cover story.38 At this writing, legislation to criminalize torture was still pending before the Brazilian Senate.

Although the individual cases documented in the chapters that follow focus almost exclusively on extrajudicial executions and near-fatal shootings, this report would not fairly address the problem of police violence if it did not at least consider the practice of torture. Our previous reports on police violence addressed the issue of torture in police precincts in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Our research for this report confirms that torture is still a routine practice in police precincts throughout Brazil, a practice that is widely accepted, particularly when the victim is a poor, criminal suspect. Torture is practiced by members of all police forces in Brazil-state civil and military police as well as federal police. Although the federal police have a better human rights record than their state counterparts, the October 1995 death of José Ivanildo Sampaio de Souza after his detention and torture by federal police in Fortaleza, capital of the northeastern state of Ceará, illustrates that even this unit engages in torture.

In the course of investigating police homicides, Human Rights Watch/Americas received credible reports of physical mistreatment and torture in each of the seven states considered in this report. According to the staff at thehuman rights office of the municipal government of Belo Horizonte, between two and five cases of torture and beatings by police are reported to them every week. Indeed, two crusading prosecutors in the Human Rights Division of the public prosecutors' office in Belo Horizonte told Human Rights Watch/Americas they had indicted 500 of the roughly 3,500 civil police officers in the city on charges of abuse of authority or assault and battery. These are the only crimes for which police may be prosecuted for torturing criminal suspects, as long as torture is not specifically codified as a crime.

The reasons for this widespread practice are varied. Most analysts agree that the lack of adequate training often leads police to use torture rather than more sophisticated investigation techniques. Also, no doubt, the impunity that police torturers frequently enjoy plays a key role in the continued practice. In this regard, the Brazilian Congress, which has repeatedly failed to pass legislation to criminalize torture, must be afforded its due share of responsibility. Whatever the causes, torture is common in police precincts, and survivors' testimony in this regard is shocking. One victim provided the Human Rights Commission of the Legislative Assembly this statement about the torture he suffered at the hands of a policeman in a precinct in Bahia on April 13, 1995:

[...]The guy grabbed me and hit me twice, on Friday. He put me with my hands over the table, curved, this way, and cut my finger here and here. Afterwards he put me standing against the wall and threw a knife to see if it would get stuck on the door. Afterwards he put me in there with a prisoner named Dudu, who beat me. On Friday I didn't sleep; they kept on giving me showers every twenty minutes, and they kept beating me. On Saturday, policeman Joaquim put me this way and beat me, he broke a nightstick on my back, took another one, and kept beating me. Afterwards he commanded me to spread a cream, like those used on toilet seats, over the head of the nightstick. Then he introduced the stick into my [anus] three times, I kept falling down and he kept beating me. I went to the bathroom to defecate, I was going to defecate in the toilet when he said : "You're not going to defecate in the toilet, you're going to do it on the ground so that you can eat it." Then I defecated on the ground and he made me eat it. Afterwards he beat me, I was cleaning the walls which were dirty with blood and he was beating me. Afterwards he put me in there, my legs were all washed with blood, he threw alcohol at them andset them afire, I was going to put the fire out and he said: "Don't do it, you son of a bitch!"39

The chapters that follow consider the practice of police violence in seven capital cities throughout Brazil. We first present Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the two cities in which we have concentrated the majority of our previous work in this area. We also highlight these two cities-Brazil's largest and most important-because of the sharp contrasts between the policies in the area of public security since our last comparative study, released in May 1993. In the chapters that follow, we consider cases of police violence in five other Brazilian cities.

On September 20, 1996, Luís Paulo da Silva Garcia mugged Francisca Maria Lopes Farias, a thirty-year-old waitress in the Méier neighborhood in the northern section of Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after the robbery, military police officers Lt. Paulo Lavareda Veloso and Cpl. Valdemar Rangel Brandão arrested Silva Garcia. The police took Silva Garcia as well as Lopes Farias and her husband, Raimundo Juracy Abreu Farias, to the 23rd police precinct in Rio de Janeiro in police car number 54-1717.40

After processing the arrest at the headquarters of the Secretariat of Public Security, the two policemen took Silva Garcia, Lopes Farias, and Abreu Farias back to the 23rd police precinct. According to press reports, while the car was in motion, and in the presence of the two victims and his fellow officer, Lieutenant Lavareda placed his gun to the back of Silva Garcia's head and fired.41 The bullet passed through Silva Garcia's head and exited through his eye, killing him.42

The detention and execution of Silva Garcia was only revealed two weeks later when an anonymous caller reported the incident to the "Disque Denúncia" (abuse hotline) operated by the secretary of public security. Official investigations corroborated the caller's report, and subsequent press investigations uncovered more details of the incident. Milton Correa da Costa, spokesman for Secretary of Public Security Nilton Cerqueira, characterized the killing to the press as "an isolated incident."43 However, our research attests to the incident's banality. Both the initial violence committed by Silva Garcia against Lopes Farias and the brutal and illegal response of Rio de Janeiro police are increasingly common events. Indeed, a recent increase in police homicides in Rio has not resulted so much fromthe failure to control abusive police but rather from state policies that foster official violence.

The Context of the Violence

In the past two decades, drug related violence has become an increasingly serious problem in Rio de Janeiro, where the lower levels of trafficking hierarchy are dominated by organized crime gangs ensconced in the favelas. Battles for turf and control among the gangs have been frequent and, thanks to a thriving illegal arms trade, violent. Confrontations between the police and traffickers have often been marked by indiscriminate shooting. Innocent bystanders, primarily favela dwellers but also including some residents of Rio's middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, have been killed in crossfire. Nonetheless, despite significant popular support for violent police, Rio de Janeiro state authorities implemented several programs in the early 1990s, documented in a 1993 Human Rights Watch/Americas report to curb police violence.44 That report concluded that although the incidence of police officers' off-duty participation in death squads was quite high, uniformed police killings by Rio police were low, at least in comparison to their counterparts in São Paulo. Unfortunately, since the publication of our 1993 report, much has changed for the worse in the policing of Rio de Janeiro.

In late 1994 the state of Rio de Janeiro and the federal government agreed to bring in federal military troops to assist the police. The agreement was the product of mounting public furor over violence by the drug gangs and the police, jockeying by gubernatorial candidates, and steady pressure by the press. The agreement launched an unprecedented joint military-police effort, dubbed Operation Rio, to sweep away Rio de Janeiro's criminal gangs. Operation Rio forces engaged in dozens of occupations of the favelas in the city of Rio as well as outlying areas. Human Rights Watch/Americas's January 1996 report, "Fighting Violence with Violence," concluded that Operation Rio was punctuated by torture, arbitrary detentions, and warrantless searches and at least one case of unnecessary use of lethal force.

In Operation Rio, the army was deployed to help in the fight against drug trafficking gangs precisely because of the notorious violence and corruption of Rio's police. Unfortunately, Operation Rio did not include any effort by state or federal authorities to curb human rights violations committed by Rio de Janeiropolice. As we documented in our report on Operation Rio, during the period of federal military intervention, state police forces continued to violate fundamental human rights in the course of their routine law enforcement. In the year since the release of that report, as we document below, Rio de Janeiro military police forces have continued to intensify their use of illegal violence in their battle with criminal suspects and favela residents.

Bravery Pay Bonuses and Promotions

Since Gen. Nilton Cerqueira assumed control of the Secretariat of Public Security in May 1995, two policies-the bravery promotion and the bravery pay raise-have contributed to the increase in military police violence in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The first policy, the promotion for bravery, was introduced in the military police in 1975. For several years after its enactment, this promotion was used only when the police officer involved served as an auxiliary to the army in wartime. In 1981, state legislation expanded the ambit of the promotion to include all public security operations, including routine police actions. This norm was codified by gubernatorial decree in 1985, but was rarely used until General Cerqueira came into office.

According to the bulletin establishing the procedures for evaluating candidates for the bravery promotion, eleven factors must be met in order for a policeman to be eligible. A special commission composed of three commissioned officers evaluates each application in light of the eleven factors, several of which are highly subjective. One of the eleven factors is the existence (or not) of two or more uninterested witnesses. Another is the detention-not the execution-of all criminals involved.45

Human Rights Watch/Americas gained access to the official police records authorizing the promotions of 179 police officers between May 25, 1995, and April 16, 1996. These ninety-seven reports evaluated a total of ninety-two incidents.46 Our examination of those documents established that in the vast majority of cases, the special commission authorized promotion despite the fact that one or more of the formal requirements for the promotion were not met. In less than one quarter of the cases did police report having detained the criminals involved. Another factor routinely disregarded was the need for two or more independent witnesses. Even when two or more witnesses existed, in several cases authorities failed to include their statements in the official documentation. The table below demonstrates the frequency with which promotions were authorized despite the failure to meet the independent witness category.

Table 1: Percentage of Promotions Approved with and without Witnesses

Incidents without two witnesses		Incidents with two witnesses and no statements		Incidents with two witnesses and witness statements as part of the process		Total Incidents
74	80.4%	8	8.7%	10	10.9 %	92	100 %

A third requirement frequently disregarded by the commission was the numerical inferiority of the police forces demonstrating bravery. On October 11, 1995, for example, twenty-four police officers were promoted.47 In one case, according to the police form, five police officers engaged in a shootout with two men, killing both. The full description justifying the promotion of the five police officers is reproduced below:

On September 9, 1995, at about 7 p.m., a group of five officers [Nadelson José Dias, Ricardo Silva Reis, Renato Cezar dos Santos Silva, Djalmir Santos, Gilcinei da Cunha Abreu] were patrolling the Jockey Club neighborhood in [the] São Gonçalo [section of Rio de Janeiro] when they saw a car with two men inside. Suspecting these two individuals, they gave an order for the car to stop, which was not heeded. The driver of the car accelerated. The police officers followed the car. On Anaia road and Xavier Curado street, the occupants of the vehicle exited and began firing at the police, who responded energetically, injuring the two outlaws who arrived dead at the Alcântara Emergency Room.

The outlaws [marginais] were found to be in the possession of a .38 caliber revolver and a .12 gauge shotgun and the vehicle they were using proved to be stolen from the area of the 77th precinct.

The efforts of these police serve as an example for the other members of the force; they spared no efforts to eliminate from among us two dangerous outlaws.48

In many cases the physical evidence, including coroners' reports, is inconsistent with the police version of events. The case of the death of Saul Santos de Araújo is exemplary in this regard. According to the police incident report, at 4:00 p.m. on June 26, 1995, a group of police officers under the command of Cpl. Joel do Amaral Soares was passing by the Shalimar Hotel on Niemeyer Avenue when it encountered "eight heavily armed elements, who, on seeing the police vehicle, fired numerous shots from firearms."49 The police called for reinforcements; shortly thereafter, a group of police led by Cpl. Paulo Cesar Carvalhido arrived. The police report then describes a shootout between the police forces and the "elements." According to the police, in the course of the shootout, the police wounded one of the suspects. The police took this individual (later identified as Saul Santos de Araújo) to the Miguel Corto Municipal Hospital, where he died.50

On October 18, 1995, a special investigation commission recommended the promotion for bravery of Corporals Soares and Carvalhido.51 The summary of events in the commission's report reiterates the brief summary included in the police incident report.52 The coroner's report on this case concludes that Saul Santos de Araújo received three bullet wounds to the temple, all within a circumference of no more than two inches. Forensic experts consulted by Human Rights Watch/Americas found the description of the wounds in the coroner's report consistent with an execution, not a shootout.53

In another case, two police were recommended for promotion based on an incident in which the police (along with an unspecified number of other officers) killed four individuals in a vehicle that failed to stop when ordered to do so. The conclusion of that report suggests that eliminating criminal suspects-rather than detaining them-may well be the motivating factor behind many promotions for bravery:

The police action was fully legal and legitimate, having been crowned with success and reaching excellent results, eliminating 4 (four) known outlaws from circulation. . . This characterizes an act of bravery, by unanimous decision of this Commission.54

The second program that has marked Cerqueira's tenure as head of public security forces has been the bravery pay raise. On November 8, 1995, Gov. Marcello Alencar signed a decree authorizing pay raises for civil and military police officers and firefighters who demonstrate "special merit" as determined by the state's Secretariat of Public Security.55 According to the terms of the decree, the pay raises authorized range from 50 to 150 percent of the officer's base salary.56

In an interview with Human Rights Watch/Americas, Col. Ivan Bastos, president of the Military Police and Firefighters Officers' Club, explained how the pay bonuses distort hierarchy within the military police.57 For example, the salary of a sergeant receiving the maximum 150 percent pay raise for bravery may surpass that of a first lieutenant. The salary of a corporal, adjusted by 150 percent, may equal that earned by a captain. Bastos explained that the bonus system has created disciplinary problems within the military police and produced perverse incentives for non-violent police to kill to compete financially with their peers. Below, we reproduce a table of monthly salaries, with and without pay raises, according to the Military Police and Firefighters Officers' Club.

Through March 1996, according to Colonel Bastos, the military police had authorized 257 pay bonuses based on bravery. According to press reports, of the twenty-three police officers honored for bravery in a March 29, 1996 ceremony, sixteen had participated in shootings that claimed a total of nine lives.58 According to Colonel Bastos, "Many policemen go for [the bravery rewards] to be promoted and make more money. They are true bounty hunters. Since they're unprepared, the result is an increase in the number of deaths on both sides."59

Secretary of Public Security Cerqueira considers his critics "poor souls." As he told the Folha de S. Paulo, "In all activities there are rewards for those who produce the most. Why should the police professional be discriminated against?"60 In an August meeting with Cerqueira, Human Rights Watch/Americas requested that he consider the possibility of limiting the bravery promotions and pay raises to officers involved in incidents with no civilian fatalities. Secretary Cerqueira rejected the proposal, asserting emphatically that "crooks are not civilians" and that he wanted his police to capture criminals "dead or alive."61

The Ninth Military Police Battalion-which covers the outlying area known as Rocha Miranda and includes numerous favelas including Acari, Parada de Lucas, and Vigário Geral-has committed a disproportionately large number of police homicides of civilians in Rio de Janeiro. Its commanders have been rewarded with bravery promotions. Ninth Battalion commander Lt. Col. Marcos Paes has reportedly attributed the deaths of seventy-five people from August 1995 (when Paes assumed command of the Ninth Battalion) to February 1996 to his unit.62

Paes assured the press that the deaths attributed to the Ninth Battalion occurred in legitimate gun battles with criminal suspects: "They were marginals who fell during confrontation. All the dead had weapons and were firing at the police. . ..They had heavy weaponry."63 According to the Rio de Janeiro daily Jornal do Brasil, the Special Commission of Summary Investigation of the Military Police approved Paes's promotion-for bravery-to the post of colonel. The Jornal do Brasil reported that this promotion is the highest ever for bravery in Rio.64

Arrest reports filed by 1st Lt. Marcelo Moreira Malheiros of the Ninth Battalion-also promoted for bravery in 1996-include eleven cases between September 9, 1995, through February 18, 1996, in which eighteen civilians died. Malheiros led eight of the eleven operations and participated in three others. In the eleven cases documented, the police arrested only one person. All the actions took place in poor neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. In no case were crime scene investigations performed to determine the circumstances of the killings. Malheiros was promoted for bravery by decree on August 21, 1996. The form authorizing this honor described Malheiros as a "brave officer . . . whose actions are always directed toward the preservation of public order [and] . . . whose dedication [is] . . . demonstrated in his brilliant actions."65

Authorization to Carry a Second Weapon

In addition to the policies concerning bravery, the Secretariat of Public Security has promoted other measures which may stimulate illegal violence. One such measure is the authorization for police officers to carry a second weapon, not licensed to the military police. By official note of July 6, 1995,66 the military police of the state of Rio de Janeiro authorized officers to carry a second weapon, owned by the particular police officer, while on duty. The note that authorizes the use of the second weapon is justified, in part, by the fact that "military police officers must, necessarily, be technically, physically and emotionally prepared for the full exercise of their mission."67

This justification, however, pales in light of the potential for abuse that the authorization to carry a second weapon brings with it. In prior reports, Human Rights Watch/Americas has noted how corrupt, violent police officers in Brazil often use a second weapon to make an extrajudicial execution appear to have been a shootout. As we wrote in 1993, "the police will often corroborate their claim that there was armed resistance by producing a weapon attributed to the victim. People who are knowledgeable about the military justice system say that it is common for the police to plant such weapons, which are called in slang `cabritos.'"68 Authorization to carry a second weapon facilitates this process, by enabling police officers to openly carry weapons other than those registered to the police (and other than the second weapon permitted by the military police).

Military Police Inquiries and the "Averiguação"

According to Brazilian law, crimes committed by military police officers, or involving military police officers, must be investigated by means of a military police inquiry. According to the Military Code of Criminal Procedure, the "military police inquiry is the summary investigation of facts which, in legal terms, constitute military crimes."69 The Military Penal Code defines military crimes to include all incidents in which military officers kill, injure or are killed or severely injured themselves.70 Under Brazilian law, the military police inquiry should include witness statements, expert examinations of the crime scene, ballistic tests and other documents relating to the investigation. When completed according to the law, military police inquiries often include hundreds of sheets of documentary evidence.

An official note of November 3, 1994, issued by the Rio military police, established the appropriate procedure for opening military police inquiries in cases of armed encounters between military police and criminal elements:

The Command [of the military police] determines . . . that in all police actions in which there are encounters with criminal elements which resultin the death of military police or civilians: a military police inquiry must be opened, even though the fact has been presented to a [civil] police precinct, and notwithstanding the completion of a resisting arrest report [auto de resistência].71

On October 4, 1995, however, the Rio military police altered this policy, eliminating the military police inquiry and replacing it with an investigation report (averiguação). The official note authorizing this change states:

This Command determines . . .that in all police actions in which there are encounters with criminal elements which result in the death of military police or civilians, that an investigation report (averiguação) be opened, in which all statements must be reduced to written form, which should be concluded within thirty days.72

The averiguação procedure does not require the same degree of investigation as the military police inquiry, nor does it require that crime scene evidence or other tests (such as ballistic tests) be performed. According to Colonel Bastos, the averiguação is a rapid and superficial process used to guarantee the impunity of the police involved.73

Resisting Arrest Reports and the Killing of Civilians

The resisting arrest report is the form that the police should complete when, in the course of their lawful activity, they encounter armed resistance. In practice, however, the form is routinely used by police to mischaracterize suspicious incidents in which they kill civilians. A recent study of the history of the resistance form by a Rio de Janeiro judge demonstrates how police in the state have used the form as a means of undermining investigation into their illegal homicides for twodecades.74 According to the Rio de Janeiro daily, Jornal do Brasil, which performed a study of 147 resistance reports registered between January 1995 and February 1996, the military police in Rio de Janeiro have killed increasingly more civilians since Cerqueira assumed control of the Secretariat of Public Security in May 1995, and have increasingly made use of these resisting arrest reports to document the killings.75 Analysis of these police reports in the city of Rio de Janeiro demonstrated a nearly six-fold increase in the number of civilians killed by military police-from just over three (3.2) per month to more than twenty (20.55) per month since General Cerqueira took over.

Cerqueira has acknowledged that not all the deaths reported in the resisting arrest reports were legitimate: "We are not so naive as to say that all the resisting arrest reports have strictly complied with the law," he told the Jornal do Brasil.76 From January 1995 through February 1996, according to press sources, the military police killed 201 people in the city of Rio. The monthly homicide rate that these figures represent-more than fourteen-is roughly six times the figure for another notoriously violent city's police force, that of New York City.77 The population of Rio de Janeiro is roughly 35 percent smaller than that of New York. Thus, based on these data, the Rio de Janeiro military police killed roughly eleven times as many civilians per capita as their counterparts in New York during a similar time period.78 The figure of fourteen civilians per month killed does not include those civilians killed by the civil police.

Disappearance: Jorge Antônio Careli

Since the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil, instances of politically motivated forced disappearances of persons have virtually ceased. Nonetheless,cases of police arrests of ordinary criminal suspects followed by detainees' subsequent "disappearance" continue to occur. A series of reports by the Rio de Janeiro daily O Dia contends that dozens of criminal suspects have been "disappeared" in Rio since Brazil's return to democratic rule in 1985. However, reliable non-press figures on the frequency of this occurrence are not available. At a minimum, a shocking number of corpses--victims of homicides--are uncovered in the state of Rio de Janeiro each year under circumstances which are never clarified. For example, former State Attorney General Antônio Carlos Biscaia told Human Rights Watch/Americas that in roughly 30% of the nearly 8,000 homicides reported in the state in a given year, the victim is never identified.79 Below, we consider the case of Jorge Antônio Careli, "disappeared" since August 1993.

At about 8:00 p.m. on August 10, 1993, a group of twenty-three heavily-armed police from the Anti-Kidnapping Division (Divisão Anti-Seqüestro, DAS), and an unidentified number of civilians, raided the Varginha favela in the Manguinhos section of Rio de Janeiro. The raid was apparently intended to investigate the recent disappearance of Marco Antônio de Moraes de Souza Rocha.80 Jorge Antônio Careli, a thirty-year-old employee of the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz Hospital complex in Rio de Janeiro, was in a bar in the Varginha favela waiting to use a public telephone when the police arrived.81 When the phone became available, Careli placed a phone call to Marly da Silva. At this point, several officers seized, beat, and detained Careli, placing him in a white van and leaving the favela. Since then, Careli has remained disappeared.82

Shortly after Careli's detention, several phone calls were placed to Marly da Silva from two cellular phones that were later established to belong to the DAS police division. In those calls, according to court records, the callers solicited information about Careli and threatened Marly da Silva.

Based on the statements of witnesses to Careli's detention, as well as telephone records and other evidence, the public prosecutors' office indicted twenty-three police officers involved in the DAS raid on the Varginha favela on August 10, 1993, for the illegal detention of Careli as well for causing injuries to a three-year-old boy in the course of the raid.83 After trial, on May 19, 1994, Judge Heraldo Saturnino de Oliveira issued his sentence, acquitting all of the indicted officers. De Oliveira's sentence found that the evidence in the case demonstrated conclusively that the police involved had in fact detained Careli. However, because the individual responsibility of the police involved had not been established, de Oliveira acquitted all the defendants.84

More than a year later, in August 1995, Lindalva Tereza dos Prazeres, in prison on kidnapping charges, told the press that she had seen Careli shortly after his August 1993 detention in the DAS police precinct, bleeding badly and barely able to speak. Dos Prazeres' told the press that she had been forced to clean blood from the van in which Careli had been transported. Her statement prompted the the Internal Affairs Division of the civil police to reopen the case.85 In connection with this new investigation, Dos Prazeres identified, from photographs, five police officers from the DAS that she contended were involved in the mistreatment of Careli in the DAS precinct.86 However, at this writing, according to a source closeto the case, the police inquiry remains stalled and is unlikely to result in anyone's indictment. Careli remains "disappeared."

Public Perception of the Police in Rio de Janeiro

According to a survey performed by Datafolha, the research division of the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, and published in that daily in January 1996, 88 percent of those polled in Rio and São Paulo believed the police are involved in organized crime. Among those interviewed, 76 percent believed that policemen are active in death squads. Sixty-five percent of those polled believed that police torture suspects to obtain confessions.87

In August 1996, a survey performed by the Getúlio Vargas Institute (Fundação Getúlio Vargas - FGV) and the Institute of Research on Religion (Instituto de Estudos da Religião - ISER) revealed the strikingly low level of confidence that most Rio de Janeiro residents have in their police. In the past two years, according to the survey, only 12 percent of those who were robbed reported the crime to the police.88 Of those victims who reported incidents of theft to the police, the survey showed that 33 percent were from the upper classes. In the lower classes, the proportion of theft victims that sought police assistance reached only 11 percent. In all, while 8 percent of all those polled had been subject to some form of theft in the past two years, only 15 percent of that subgroup had reported these thefts to the police.89

In the dawn hours of August 11, 1996, five armed men entered the Bodega bar in the upscale Moema neighborhood of São Paulo and proceeded to rob the bar's patrons. One young man in the bar, a student named Milton Bertoline Neto, delayed in removing his wristwatch. One of the gunmen shot him in the arm. While the men were robbing other patrons, a twenty-five-year-old dentist, José Renato Tahan, entered the bar. The robbers fired two shots, killing him instantly. The gunmen fled the bar, but not before firing a few shots back through its front window. One of these shots fatally wounded Adriana Ciola. She died on the way to the hospital.

Although São Paulo residents are accustomed to news reports of robberies and killings, they were not prepared to see the violence that afflicts the city arrive in its most affluent neighborhoods. In the weeks following the killings, the Brazilian media provided ample coverage to the outraged reaction of city residents. In response to the Bodega killing, influential sectors of São Paulo society joined to form "React São Paulo" (Reage São Paulo), a civic organization modeled on "React Rio," a group founded in late 1995 in response to three highly publicized kidnappings. At the same time, the São Paulo and national media gave increasing coverage to one unfortunate aspect of the public reaction to the Bodega incident: the hostility of many crime victims toward human rights and their defense.90

On August 27, 1996, the police arrested nine young men in connection with the crime: Luicano Francisco Jorge, Valmir da Silva, Natal Francisco dos Santos, Marcelo Nunes Fernandes, Jailson Ribeiro dos Anjos, Benedito Dias de Souza, Valmir Vieira Martins, Marcelo Silva, and a minor, identified as C.A.S, aged sixteen. State Secretary of Public Security José Afonso da Silva appeared in the 15th precinct to congratulate the police on their speedy work in solving the case.

Two months later, however, prosecutor Eduardo Araújo da Silva filed his final report on the case, concluding that there was not sufficient evidence to indict any of those detained. Araújo criticized the unprofessional nature of the police workdone in the case. None of those detained, for example, had been identified by the bar's patrons. More worrisome, Araújo revealed to the press that the detainees had all given credible statements to the judge overseeing the case detailing the abuses, including torture sessions, to which they had been subjected to force their confessions. Benedito Dias de Souza told the press, "[T]hey beat me and gave me electric shocks and they left me for five days without food."91 Luciano Francisco Jorge reported having been tortured on several occasions in the precinct, including by the assistant precinct chief.92 In the weeks following the release of the nine original suspects, the police arrested four other men under suspicion of participation in the Bodega robbery. In contrast with the case against the original suspects, which rested exclusively on extrajudicial confessions apparently extracted by torture, evidence against the second group included identification by witnesses from the bar and the seizure of items stolen on the night of the assault in the possession of two of the detainees.

The Bodega case, the public response that it triggered and the gross abuses by police that allegedly ensued provide insight into the dynamics of violence and police abuse in São Paulo, which, like Rio de Janeiro, is a violent city. Criminal violence in São Paulo provides the fuel that many citizens convert into support for violent police behavior. This support, in turn, is viewed by many violent police authorities as license to commit abuses. Even after the revelations of how the case was mishandled, including the alleged use of torture, the Association of Police Precinct Chiefs criticized the prosecutor's decision not to indict the nine detainees, and community leaders honored the police accused of torture.

Police Violence in São Paulo: Recent Trends

Human Rights Watch/Americas has reported on police violence in São Paulo in several publications since 1987.93 Our last report to focus exclusively on policeviolence in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, released in 1993, noted a dangerous upward spiral in the number of civilians killed by the state's military police.94

In the past several years, however, the dangerous trend of police killings has been reversed in São Paulo. Beginning in 1993, the year after military police homicides in the state of São Paulo reached their peak, the number of civilians killed by the military police has fallen consistently. The reduction in military police homicides began almost immediately after the October 1992 massacre at the Casa de Detenção (House of Detention) within the Carandiru prison facility, as the figures below demonstrate.

Since 1992 the number of civilians killed by São Paulo military police in the Greater São Paulo metropolitan area has fallen in a fairly consistent manner.