Rio de Janeiro’s state governor, Cláudio Castro, has vowed to strike back against organised crime after paramilitary gangsters launched an unprecedented assault on Rio’s public transport system, torching dozens of vehicles in what the politician called “terrorist acts”.
Criminals reportedly set fire to at least 35 buses and coaches, four lorries and a train on Monday, during what local media described as one of the biggest criminal attacks in Rio’s history.
The attacks were reportedly a retaliation for the killing of a senior paramilitary leader called Matheus da Silva Rezende by police special forces. “He was known as ‘the Lord of War’,” Rio’s right-wing governor claimed at an emergency press conference on Monday evening as security forces and firefighters scrambled to respond to the wave of attacks across western Rio.
The eruption of violence – dramatic even for a state that has spent decades grappling with crime that claims thousands of lives each year – brought parts of Brazil’s most famous city to a standstill and forced at least 45 schools to close, affecting thousands of students.
The broadsheet O Globo declared “Rio under siege”. City Hall urged citizens to avoid the affected areas as a result of what the “high impact occurrence”.
“The westside is ablaze,” tweeted security specialist Cecília Olliveira, the founder of a violence-monitoring group called Fogo Cruzado.
Footage shared on social media showed dozens of passengers throwing themselves off one bus as criminals prepared to set fire to it and thick plumes of black smoke rising into the sky.
The attacks reportedly took place in at least nine different areas – Cosmos, Campo Grande, Inhoaíba, Guaratiba, Madureira, Paciência, Santa Cruz, Sepetiba and Recreio dos Bandeirantes – where about one million people live.
Government officials and media reports attributed the violence to the widely feared milícias (militias) – politically connected mafia-style groups which have seized control of huge swaths of Rio over the past two decades.
Last year Fogo Cruzado claimed the militias – which began life as community self-defence groups formed by off-duty police officers and prison guards before morphing into murderous criminal mafias – now controlled an area almost the size of Birmingham, the UK’s second biggest city, where more than 1.7 million people live.
Governor Castro said 12 criminals had been arrested in connection with Monday’s attacks and would be charged with “terrorist acts”. “I have no doubt that tomorrow will be a much more orderly and calm day,” he told reporters, vowing to wage a “hard fight” against such criminals “24-hours a day, seven days a week”. “Evil will not prevail over Good,” Castro declared, warning organised crime groups not to dare to challenge the state.
But security experts described Monday’s attacks as a brazen offensive against Rio’s authorities which exposed successive governments’ failure to bring organised crime under control.
The violence came hours after the shooting of Rezende, 24, who is reportedly the nephew of one of Rio’s most notorious criminal leaders, Luis Antonio da Silva Braga, a paramilitary chief nicknamed Zinho. Rezende was reportedly shot dead during a police operation in Três Pontes, a redbrick favela that is a notorious militia stronghold.
