Shortly soon after midnight on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of inmates watched from a Manaus prison yard as the sky lit up with fireworks, paid for by the gangs that dominate the jail program.
The revelry continued well into the subsequent day, and inmates celebrated with their wives and girlfriends. But then the guards noticed something strange: The prisoners had been asking their guests to go. “That is all for now, leave now,” guards heard prisoners say. The last household member left at four:09 p.m. on New Year’s Day.
What happened subsequent would go beyond any worst-case situation imagined by guards or authorities, unleashing a brutality that would lay bare a failed prison method and a gruesome battle among gangs for influence in Latin America’s largest nation. The bloodshed would be the worst at any Brazilian prison in the previous 25 years.
The Associated Press gained exclusive access to the Complexo Penitenciario Anisio Jobim. What follows is based on the facility take a look at, footage from inmates on their mobile phones, forensics reports obtained by the AP and extra than a dozen interviews with families of victims, authorities, lawyers, prison guards, judges, the warden and investigators.
“This was unprecedented,” mentioned Carlos Procopio dos Reis, in charge of the medical forensics unit in Manaus. “I still dream that I am in a truck throwing heads for people to catch.”
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Known by its Portuguese acronym of Compaj, the Manaus prison compound sprawls into the Amazon jungle. Families devote at least an hour on a prison bus line to get to the isolated penitentiary. Made for 592 inmates, it held 1,224 on New Year’s Day.
Manaus, a violent and gritty northern city of 2 million individuals, is the jumping-off point to the Amazon and central to Northern Brazil’s expanding drug trade. Drugs come here from Peru and Colombia via the Solimoes River and head to Belem, a port city by the Atlantic Ocean. Control of that waterway means access to the profitable European marketplace.
From prisons like Compaj about the nation, gang leaders oversee huge drug companies. For years, Brazil’s two most effective gangs had a non-aggression pact. But that truce ruptured in October, for causes professionals say are still unclear, leading to riots in various prisons. At least 130 inmates have been killed nationwide considering the fact that Jan. 1.
At the rough prison complex of Manaus, the New Year’s celebrations began with a uncommon moment of joy, as inmates danced to funk music with their wives and girlfriends inside the concrete 20-foot-tall walls. The next day, following every person left, the tense moment came when prisoners required to be locked up again.
But the lockup never occurred. Instead, inmates linked to the Family members of the North gang surrounded a prison guard and took him hostage, with a blade to his neck. Then they announced their bigger intention: To get rid of all members of the rival Very first Command gang, also recognized as PCC.
“We will kick out of this prison every single single PCC brain!” a prisoner from Household of the North yelled to the Compaj cameras.
That was amongst the last moments captured on film by the prison security cameras. Just immediately after, inmates began to break the cameras, as they took more than the prison. “It is all ours,” 1 of them shouted.
From then on, the only reports available came from witnesses and footage shot on mobile phones smuggled in to the prisoners.
The Family members of the North moved speedily. Carrying knives, homemade shivs and even several pistols, prisoners led the very first hostage into the atrium. There, they took another 14 guards and other employees hostage, like a cook and a nurse. Authorities say the inmates smuggled in their guns and blades via tunnels that enter a handful of regions of the prison and possibly holes in the wall.
While the main target was the rival gang, the attacking prisoners had a score to settle first with former policeman Moacir Jorge Pessoa da Costa, who had been jailed for killing drug dealers. At four:17 p.m., the attackers told the other people that Costa would be the very first to be killed.
The inmates wanted to behead and dismember him, but they struggled to break the lock on his cell. So as an alternative, reaching by way of the bars, they lit mattresses in his cell on fire and burned him alive. Rapists in the same wing would later meet a comparable fate.
At four:30 p.m., Family of the North prisoners began getting into an location exactly where numerous members of Very first Command were housed. The wing was known as “the safe.”
“Vai morrer!,” they shouted into a cell made for eight inmates but jammed with at least 27. “You are going to die!”
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The battle amongst Family members of the North and Initially Command is basically more than drug routes in northern Brazil. The rift escalated final year when Family members of the North from the Amazon teamed up with Comando Vermelho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second greatest gang. The evidence of that union is carved below the paint of some Compaj walls, exactly where the acronyms FDN and CV can be noticed.
On the other side of the war is the effective Very first Command, primarily based in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s richest and most organized gang. Very first Command was born out of the largest prison massacre in Brazil’s history, when military police killed at least 111 inmates throughout a 1992 rebellion. The gang has been expanding north, and now wants to take handle of the Solimoes River from its rivals.
Family members of the North regional leaders — nicknamed “Maraba,” ”Caroco,” ”Demetrio,” ”Garrote,” ”Rivellino” and “Maguila” — headed the charge at Compaj. Authorities nevertheless never know regardless of whether the carnage was ordered from the outdoors by the gang’s best leaders, who are held in higher-safety federal prisons far from Manaus.
Crammed into their cells, lots of 1st Command prisoners had little room to run or Perabet suggests to fight back. More than the next 15 minutes, quite a few were shot, stabbed or both. The screams of horror and discomfort filled the lockup.
Some First Command guys managed to get to the roof of their cell block to hide. At least three jumped into the gutter, spending half a day drenched in feces and urine. A group of evangelical prisoners pleaded with the killers to quit, but they have been locked in their cells.
No guards tried to intervene, as numerous had been taken hostage. But an elite police force surrounded the prison, in an try to preserve hundreds of inmates from escaping by way of a hole in one particular wall.
More than the next 30 minutes, with police nonetheless outside, prisoners dragged dozens of bodies into the location dubbed Pavilion three. Then Family of the North members, and other prisoners forced to take orders, started cutting. By the time they were completed, 39 heads were lined up on the floor.
They also lopped off and piled up limbs, even from bodies that had been carbonized. They cut out 13 eyes and two hearts, and employed them to terrorize other folks. One guard was forced to eat an eyeball. A transvestite prisoner was created to take bites of a heart, throwing up as she did so.
In the meantime, prisoners made use of their cellphones to capture pictures and video of themselves, with a Loved ones of the North flag in the background. At 1 point, a headless physique seems. At one more, an inmate holds up the hand of a dead particular person and waves to the camera, “He is saying bye.”
But Loved ones of the North members wanted extra. They wanted the whole prison, which housed about 200 extra First Command members in other places. If they succeeded, the massacre would get even worse.
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The initially negotiations started at 6:30 p.m., when human rights activist and lawyer Epitacio Almeida, who knew most of the prisoners by name, talked with them by means of a radio device. But the talks had been complicated soon after inmates shot a policeman in the proper arm.
At six:45 p.m., the initial hostage was released for healthcare attention. By 9 p.m., a full battalion of riot police was firing on about 225 prisoners trying to escape, some by climbing the walls. It is unclear how several died. Households and prison guards believe there are nonetheless bodies in the surrounding woods.
Amazonas state Public Security Secretary Sergio Fontes referred to as in state Judge Luis Carlos Valois to mediate the crisis and gave him a bulletproof vest. At 10 p.m., the two males went previous dozens of desperate family members outside the most important gates to negotiate by means of radio.
As a sign of initial goodwill, inmates freed 3 hostages. Nevertheless, the standoff was far from over.
“You could reduce the tension in the air with a knife,” stated prison guard and union leader Rocinaldo Silva. “We feared for our colleagues inside, but we also worried about other prisons that could face the exact same trouble right after hearing the news.”
Fontes and Valois required to meet with Family of the North leaders face-to-face. It took 3 hours, but at 1 a.m. “Maraba” and “Maguila” appeared with a list of demands.
In the meantime, the sickening stench of dozens of bodies took over the complete complicated. Inmates asked for medical forensics agents to take away heads and limbs from the floor. The exact same carts inmates employed to carry meals had been ready to take remains.
At three a.m., after negotiations Fontes described as “surreal,” an agreement was reached. The prisoners bargained for common visitation of family members and females, time outside the cell and collection of bodies by health-related forensics. In exchange, they would release the remaining 12 hostages and hand over weapons and cellphones.
When Valois told the rebellion leaders that he could not stop the entry of riot police or future transfers to other prisons, the inmates got upset. So the judge and secretary created it clear that either inmates put an quick end to the rebellion or police would do it forcefully.
At about 7 a.m., the initial of 39 heads arrived at the coroner’s office in downtown Manaus. In total, 57 prisoners were killed. Fearing the worst, dozens of households lined up in front of the constructing.
By 7:30 a.m., more than 15 hours just after the rebellion began, the last hostages have been released. Survivors who have been hiding gradually reappeared.
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The massacre has left devastated households in its wake. Maria Angelina Muniz had two sons killed at Compaj: 20-year-old Antonio and 27-year-old Antony, who had been there just ten days. Antonio was in jail for theft and Antony for drug trafficking, but neither son had been convicted.
Muniz stated her family members is sparing her from the details of how they died. The caskets had been closed at the funeral.
“We knew they had a debt to society, they were paying,” Muniz said. “But now my life is destroyed simply because of this war.”
Seventeen inmates have been prosecuted and sent to tight-safety federal prisons. Prison director Jose Carvalho da Silva, who is suspected of permitting weapons and mobiles into Compaj in exchange for cash, has lost his job. Silva denies wrongdoing.
Former Amazonas Prison Secretary Pedro Florencio, a respected retired federal policeman, was also sacked mainly because the massacre happened on his watch.
“To this day, I close my eyes and see components of bodies of inmates everywhere,” Florencio said. “For me that New Year’s Day will under no circumstances finish.”
Days right after the riot, smaller uprisings erupted in other prisons. And the slaughter is most likely to continue.
Speaking to the AP through a human rights activist, Family members of the North inmates stated a recent song described what they did and promised a lot more to come. Prisoners stated they sent the lyrics to a funk artist, who put the song on YouTube.
“The strength of Loved ones of the North is creating,” goes the song. “So have no doubt that the war has just begun.”
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