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©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2005
Taken from the news section in
www.onestopenglish.com
Police accused of Rio massacre
Gareth Chetwynd in Rio de Janeiro
Sixteen-year-old Marcelo Julio Gomes do
Nascimento lived in Queimados,
a poor suburb of
Rio de Janeiro. Julinho, as his friends called him,
secretly admired the local police. They had
powerful guns and looked tough. One warm
evening last week, Julinho saw the reality of this
image of the police when he was standing outside
a bar talking to some of his friends.
An unmarked car came around the corner. The
people in the car were wearing masks. They fired
shots at Julinho and his friends. The shots were so
accurate that they didn’t
leave any marks on the
walls of the bar. Who were the men in the car?
Were they just petty criminals and was this
another random shooting? People in Queimados
now believe that the murderers were off-duty
policemen. They think that the murders were part
of a vendetta between the policemen and their
boss.
A short distance from the bar Adriana Paz Gomes
sits on the steps of
her modest home weeping for
the loss of her son. "I was watching a soap opera
when I heard the shots. I knew immediately what
it was," she says. Ms Gomes ran into the street
and found four bodies in the road. Then someone
pointed to a fifth body, the body of her son. "I
have such lovely memories of my son. He seemed
to be sleeping and
I took him in my arms, but he
didn’t wake up," she says.
Julinho’s murder was the last in a series of
shootings that night. In total 30 people died.
The shooting began in the town of Nova Iguacu,
where 18 people were killed. Some were in the
street when the killers drove past, while nine of
the victims, including three teenagers, were in a
bar playing video games. The gunmen then
moved on to Queimados where they killed 12
more people.
Local people believed the
killers were members of
the local military police force and Rio de Janeiro
authorities quickly arrested 11 police officers and
charged six of them with murder. Off-duty police
officers are often members of death squads in the
poor suburbs to the northwest of Rio de Janeiro,
in a region known as the Baixada Fluminense.
Here the murder rate is 76 per 100,000, compared
with 50 per 100,000 in metropolitan Rio, which is
one of the highest rates in the world.
In some communities people accept
these death
squads because they kill criminals and stop the
drug-trafficking gangs taking power in the shanty
towns. But last week's murders were different
because most of the victims were simply in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Some people think
the killers were protesting against a new
commanding officer who wants to stop illegal
activities by police officers.
Two days before the shootings, two men, one of
them a
drug dealer, were taken from a bar and
killed. Someone threw a human head into the
police-station compound. Then hidden cameras
filmed police officers in uniform as they were
trying to take some bodies away. Eight police
officers are now in prison because of this. The
authorities believe that last week’s murders were a
protest against these arrests.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has demanded
rapid action. "They say they are making arrests,
but this is just for show. I know that one day I'll
see the man who killed my son driving past me in
the street," Ms Gomes said.
The Guardian Weekly
15/04/2005, page 7