Spotlight: Brazil faces security crisis after prison violence

The Brazilian government is struggling to manage the country's growing security crisis after the killing of at least 89 inmates in two prison riots within a week.

A riot broke out Friday morning at the Monte Cristo penitentiary in the northern state of Roraima, when inmates from one drug gang broke the locks on their cells and invaded a wing housing prisoners from a rival gang. The bloodshed has left at least 33 prisoners dead.

Riot police had entered the prison and taken control of the situation, Roraima's Secretary of Justice Uziel Castro said.

"There are many decapitated bodies, many limbs," he said, adding that at least 30 of the 33 dead had their heads hacked off, with some even having their hearts exposed.

The killing happened five days after another riot in Manaus, the capital of the neighboring state of Amazonas, left 56 dead as members from the local group, Familia do Norte, executed prisoners from the rival Primer Comando da Capital (PCC).

Dozens of prisoners escaped on Sunday, and a spike of murders in the streets of Manaus have been noted since then, with an average of 10 people being killed each night.

Observers said the crisis is likely to continue as the growth of organized crime and the lack of state action could lead to more violence.

Another factor fueling the bloodshed is overcrowding in prisons, derived from a heavily criticized mass incarceration attitude toward crime.

Furthermore, the financial crisis beleaguering the country has sharply reduced the capacity of state governments to deal with problems.

Observers, legal professionals and academics all agree that the lack of action by authorities has led to inhumane conditions in prisons, thus fostering the violence.

A government report released in December showed that Brazil's state prisons have on average 70 percent more inmates than their maximum capacity.

According to the report, the overcrowding is also due to the excessive number placed in preventive detention, which makes up 40 percent of the Brazilian inmates, as opposed to the 25 percent on average around the world.

Tragically, only 19 percent of Brazilian prisons separate those in preventive detention from other inmates.

On Friday, the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) said that they would take the cases of these massacres to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The OAB's national President Claudio Lamachia said the massacres were caused "by the lack of concrete actions by the State to resolve the problem, which always repeats itself."

According to Lamachia, the OAB believes the prison system has "collapsed" and demands that the federal and state governments take control of prisons permanently and ensure laws are applied.

In another statement, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) asked for public policies "based on evidence," which seek alternatives to mass incarceration.

On Friday, Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes provided new details about the government's national security plan, including greater integration of federal, state and local governments to face the problem.

The killing also revealed critical failures in communication between Brasilia and state governments. It was reported this week the government of Amazonas had been warned by intelligence agencies about the risk of a riot but that information had never reached the federal level.

As for Roraima, Governor Maria Suely Campos had asked for help from President Michel Temer in November about the dangerous situation at the Monte Cristo prison, but the request went unanswered. Endi