Police

Eduardo Cunha, the nemesis of Brazil’s beleaguered president, is now the one feeling the heat

VICE News

SÃO PAULO — Eduardo Cunha — the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, who is also the nemesis of the country’s president whom he wants to see impeached — did not have a good Tuesday.

The day began with police cars surrounding Cunha’s official residence in Brasília in the latest phase of a criminal investigation into the country’s biggest-ever corruption scandal. Police said they were executing 53 search-and-seizure warrants to “avoid important evidence being destroyed by those under investigation.”

It was later reported that the warrants were related to a new Supreme Court inquiry into whether Cunha had abused his position to obstruct the vast corruption probe.

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Brazil police tear-gas protest as gov’t freezes school reforms

Ruptly

SÃO PAULO — Brazil police on Friday violently dispersed the latest in a series of protests in São Paulo over plans to shut down 94 schools in the state.

Police used tear gas and stun grenades to force the gathered crowd, whose march had blocked a major intersection in the city, to clear the streets.

At least 30 people have been detained by police in a string of protests; footage shared on social media also showed at least one student being punched in the face by an officer who had illegally removed his identification.

Shortly after Friday’s violence, however, came a victory of sorts: São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin announced that the government’s plans to reorganise the state’s schools had been suspended until next year, drawing jubilant scenes from protesters at the tail-end of their march.

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Why have murders of black women in Brazil soared but dropped for white women?

VICE News

SÃO PAULO — Violence has stalked Joana* throughout her life.

After surviving a brutal childhood she had to defend herself and her two children from an abusive husband from whom she eventually ran after he tried to stab her to death. It didn’t stop there.

Struggling to make ends meet in her new home in a violence-plagued shantytown in São Paulo, Joana took in a nephew in order to help pay the rent but he was lured into local drug gangs.

“They wanted to show us who was boss,” the 40-year-old black Brazilian told VICE News, cracking a smile that quickly faded. “They raped me and my young daughter, and threatened to do the same to my son.”

Sitting in a small stuffy room with black mold creeping down the walls, Joana remembered her desperation over five lonely years of near-daily violent abuse.

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VIDEO: Violence mars São Paulo schools protest

SÃO PAULO — A protest by students and teachers from Brazil’s São Paulo state descended into violence on Thursday when masked protesters, claiming to be Black Bloc anarchists, attacked the entrance to the local government headquarters.

The violence came after around 1,500 people had marched seven kilometres from Faria Lima to the Palácio dos Bandeirantes, in the sweltering heat, to protest the restructuring of the state’s public schools.

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Brazil cop shoots teens at close range after motorcycle chase

VICE News

SÃO PAULO — São Paulo military police have arrested an officer who was caught on camera this week firing at two teenage suspects who had fallen to the ground from a stolen motorcycle following a dangerous pursuit through the streets of Brazil’s biggest city.

It was meant to be a week when police in São Paulo State celebrated new figures that showed the lowest number of homicides on record, but the shocking end to a police chase in the south of São Paulo city — caught live from TV helicopters — quickly put paid to that.

Footage from the chase, which was broadcast live on the channels TV Bandeirantes and Record, shows a military police officer firing at and wounding the two teenagers, aged 16 and 17, at near-point-blank range after the pursuit ends abruptly.

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Despite firearm restrictions, guns kill 5 people every hour in Brazil

VICE News

SÃO PAULO — Firearms are responsible for 116 deaths every day in Brazil, according to a new study — a rate of nearly five people every hour.

The Map of Violence 2015, which UNESCO published this week in partnership with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences and the Brazilian government, calculated that gun violence ended a staggering 42,416 lives in 2012 alone, the most recent year with comprehensive data.

The national mortality rate of 21.9 gun-related fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants — of which nearly 95 percent are homicides, while the balance includes suicides, accidents, and unexplained cases — is the second highest ever recorded in the annual study’s 35-year history.

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Brazil’s overcrowded, mismanaged prisons are at breaking point

VICE News

SÃO PAULO — Brazil’s hideously overcrowded prisons see frequent outbursts of extreme violence and murders, and are infamous for being in the stranglehold of sophisticated criminal gangs that are capable of orchestrating anything from synchronized mutinies to contract killings from inside their cells.

The country’s prison population is so vast and the authorities’ ability to contain it so stretched, the lack of security at some penitentiaries is almost surreal.

This week it emerged that inmates at a jail in Piauí, one of Brazil’s most impoverished states, are regularly slipping out to go on late-night crime sprees, robbing locals of a wish list of items banned in prison.

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VIDEO: Latest MPL protest against transport fares ends in violence

Anadolu Agency

SÃO PAULO — At least six people were detained and four injured, including a minor, in São Paulo on Friday night after a largely peaceful protest against recent price rises to public transit fares turned violent.

After following a route around the historic city centre, the march returned to the Municipal Theatre, from where it had begun — and shortly afterwards chaotic scenes broke out between protesters and security forces.

Police said they responded when a flare was let off in their direction, but the protest’s organizers, the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre, MPL), said via Twitter that the security forces fired first and that those policing the event had set out to “ruin the protest with violence.”

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