A woman watches on television news about the riot in the PAMC (Agricola de Monte Cristo Penitentiary) in Roraima, northern Brazil, yesterday.
Rio de Janeiro: At least 33 inmates were killed by their rivals at a prison in northern Brazil yesterday, days after a riot by warring gangs left dozens more dead at another prison, officials said.
The government of Roraima state said the situation at PAMC (Agricola de Monte Cristo prison) was now “under control.”
The latest violence did not appear to be an all-out riot but rather a rapid early morning attack by one group of inmates against another, lasting less than an hour, a local government spokeswoman told reporters.
Most of the killings were carried out with knives, she said. No firearms have been found inside the prison so far.
The prison holds inmates from the Red Command, a powerful drug gang based in Rio de Janeiro.
It is allied with a local gang called the Family of the North.
That is the group authorities say was responsible for the grisly riot in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, where jailed gang members beheaded and mutilated 56 of their rivals in a 17-hour bloodbath Sunday and Monday.
Most of those killed in Manaus were members of a rival gang, the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command.
Rights activists have long condemned prison conditions in Brazil, where the justice ministry says 50 percent more capacity is needed to handle an inmate population swollen by efforts to crack down on a violent and lucrative drug trade.
The latest unrest comes a day after President Michel Temer announced the federal government would spend $250m to build at least one prison in each of Brazil’s 26 states to deal with chronic overcrowding blamed for a string of deadly riots.
The new prisons will each have two separate buildings, enabling authorities to separate inmates convicted of minor crimes from the most violent criminals.
The federal government will also build five new maximum security prisons and transfer “highly dangerous” gang leaders to them, Temer said.
High-tech equipment to block cell phone signals—preventing inmates from using contraband phones for criminal activities—will be deployed in 30 percent of all prisons in every state, he said.
The latest riot, which also enabled 184 inmates to escape, has cast a spotlight on Brazil’s underfunded prisons.
Prisons are often controlled in Brazil by drug gangs, whose turf wars are fought inside as well as outside prison.
Overcrowding exacerbates the problem, human rights activists say. The riot on Sunday was the deadliest in Brazil since police killed 111 inmates in a crackdown on an uprising at the Carandiru prison in Sao Paulo in 1992.
