Death squads may be behind murders of homeless people - BR

[dArKeR]

The Brazilian authorities believe that hired death squads or "social cleansing" groups are the most likely perpetrators of attacks which have killed at least seven homeless people in Sao Paulo.

On one night alone five vagrants were clubbed to death as they lay sleeping in the central district near the cathedral, and another 10 were seriously wounded.

Further attacks were carried out on subsequent days, despite an increase in police patrols. A seventh fatal beating was discovered on Thursday.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/09/01/2003201142

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

1. For god' s sake, don't let the bush admin see this.

I believe I recall something similar alleged several years ago. If so, how tragically sick can people get?

[Robbien]

2. Are you sure we are not funding those death squads through NED?

It is not as if we don't already have NED funded armed people in Haiti and Venezuela "protecting" American interests. Why not Brazil?

[dArKeR]

4. I read that American tobacco companies and Delay, Hastert, Lott, aWol

are directly supporting these type of murderers. It's in one of these reports below. Because the American tobacco companies have created a demand for murderers/torturers/blackmailers... to get their, American cigarette, products into all South American countries via smuggling so the American corporations don't have to pay taxes. And then you had Delay, Hastert, Lott and aWol cover-up and except/protect these illegal/immoral activities from the Patriot Act. Something you don't hear on Limbutt, Hannity, O'Rancid, or even 60 Minutes.

Big Tobacco - by Mark Schapiro

Tobacco is one of the most globalized industries on the planet. More cigarettes are traded than any other single product, some trillion "sticks," as they're known in the business, passing international borders each year. As a result, American brands have been propelled into every corner of the world, with just four companies controlling 70 percent of the global market. Marlboro, Kool, Kent: They have become as omnipresent around the world as they are here in the United States. With declining sales in this country, foreign markets have become increasingly critical to the tobacco companies' financial health: The top US tobacco firms now earn more from cigarettes sold abroad than in the United States. How they got there is a tale that leads straight into a global underground of smugglers and money launderers who have played a key role in facilitating the tobacco companies' entry into foreign markets…

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020506&s=schapiro

+++++++++++++++++++

How Big Tobacco Subverted Anti-Terror Act

How Big Tobacco nicked terror act Firms accused of smuggling cigarettes feared language on laundering

Mark Shaprio
MSNBC

NEW YORK, June 13 — On the one-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the tobacco industry took aim at Congress’ first effort to respond to the crisis with a major piece of new legislation — the Patriot Act. Why would America’s largest tobacco companies take an interest in a bill designed to go after America’s terrorist adversaries?

THE ANSWER: legal liability. Not that the tobacco companies are terrorists, but some of their marketing and distribution strategies look awfully similar to the illegal financing systems used by terrorists. At least they do from the U.S. Department of Justice perspective.

To get to the bottom of this story, we need to return to those traumatized days last fall, in which our lives were filled with fears of another terrorist attack, the retaliation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and shock and horror at the revelation that anthrax had contaminated the halls of
Congress.

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/intl-tobacco/2002q2/000750.html

++++++++++++++++

Cigarette giant denies smoking leads to cancer - Imperial Tobacco

A giant British tobacco company is to take the unprecedented step this week of denying there is a proven causal link between smoking and lung cancer in the first case against a cigarette firm to go to a UK court.

The unique defense, to be heard in Scotland's Court of Session, denies decades of scientific proof of such a link, which was accepted by the British Government in 1957.

Imperial Tobacco is being sued for £500,000 (US$835,000) by Margaret McTear, whose husband, Alf, a 60-a-day smoker from Beith near Glasgow, died of lung cancer in 1993. The case, which starts tomorrow, will be scrutinized across Europe by lawyers who want to bring similar actions against tobacco firms.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2003/10/06/2003070628

[skoolkid]

3. Death squads? Not professional ones anyway,

Real death squads would never club their victims and leave their bodies. They are always clean and subtle. I think it's probably just some street gang trying to shake the homeless for cash and then killing them when they don't find any.

[struggle4progress]

5. Vigilante killings of street people in Brazil has been a long-term problem

Brazil death squads denounced
Last Updated: Monday, 6 October, 2003, 11:45 GMT 12:45 UK

A United Nations envoy investigating extra-judicial killings by Brazilian police has given a damning account of her findings so far.
<snip>

She arrived in Brazil on 16 September for a three-week investigation into summary executions and other killings allegedly carried out by police.
<snip>

Human rights groups in Brazil say many killings are carried out by death squads made up of police officers and vigilantes.

Unofficial figures compiled by these groups indicate that in 1999, almost 14,000 people were killed by police or death squads.
<snip>

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3167296.stm


Brazil Death Squad Witness Slain
BRASILIA, Brazil, Oct. 10, 2003

(CBS/AP) Gunmen shot and killed a man who spoke to a U.N. investigator about police death squads, an attack that came a day after Brazil's president pledged to protect witnesses who come forward to testify about human rights abuses.

The killing of Gerson de Jesus Bispo on Thursday shocked human rights officials who have struggled to control rogue police accused of torture and summary executions in Latin America's largest country.

Bispo was the second person killed after speaking to Asma Jahangir, the United Nations official investigating extrajudicial and summary executions.
<snip>

Ten years ago, human rights defenders were shocked by two massacres in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's main tourist city. Eight street children were killed while they lay sleeping outside a church known as A Candelaria. A month later, 21 residents of a poor neighborhood were killed by heavily armed men.
<snip>

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/10/world/main577542.shtml


Covering events from January - December 2003

<snip>
“Death squads” aided by police or former police officers were reportedly responsible for “social cleansing” and organized crime. During a visit to Brazil in September, the federal government told the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir, that “death squads” were active in 15 of the country’s 26 states. The difficulty of protecting witnesses and thus ensuring prosecutions in such cases was made evident by the killing of two witnesses in the states of Bahia and Paraíba who gave evidence to Asma Jahangir. In São Paulo state, members of civil society, the state human rights commission and the police ombudsman denounced the existence of “death squads” in the towns of Guarulhos and Ribeirão Preto, reportedly responsible for numerous killings of young men in circumstances suggesting summary executions. On 16 April a military policeman from Guarulhos stated on Globo TV that he had been involved in the killing of around 115 people and that around 90 per cent of alleged police shoot-outs were staged to hide executions.

Several trials took place in relation to the 1993 Vigário Geral and Candelária massacres, in which 21 shanty town residents and eight street children were killed by military police “death squads”. One policeman was sentenced in February to 300 years’ imprisonment for the Candelária massacre, and another to 59 years’ imprisonment in September for participation in the Vigário Geral massacre. Eighteen police officers were acquitted for participation in the Vigário Geral massacre in two separate hearings. The public prosecutor’s office appealed against the acquittal of nine of these men. Out of a total of at least 40 officers originally charged with involvement in the Vigário Geral massacre, only two were reported to be in prison.
<snip>

http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/bra-summary-eng


Final Justice
Police and Death Squad Homicides of Adolescents in Brazil

Despite the considerable attention that has been brought to homicides of adolescents, impunity for those responsible for these abuses has in most respects, continued to prevail. As the cases in Final Justice reveal, this impunity is the product of several factors, but one primary cause is the lack of political will to adequately investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against children and adolescents. When the will to prosecute does exist, investigations and convictions are possible. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and even individual convictions in a handful of high-profile cases may have little impact on the larger problem and on the structures of violence that fuel abuses by Brazil's police force and unofficial death squads. The struggle to end the pattern of homicides of adolescents will not be fast or easy. A large measure of blame for this violence must be attributed to the poverty, economic and racial inequalities, domestic violence and substance abuse problems that draw poor Brazilian youth onto the streets or into crime. Similarly, complex social forces and the banalization of violence create a situation where vigilante justice is frequently an acceptable method of protecting communities, which are often poorly served by their elected governments, from those who are perceived as criminals and threats to safety. Yet protecting Brazil's children and adolescents—and particularly the most common targets of violence: poor, black or dark-skinned adolescent boys—from violence cannot and should not wait for the solutions to other entrenched social problems, particularly when it is apparent that the police, either on- or off-duty, are responsible for a significant proportion of the killings.
HRW Index No.: 1231
February 1, 1994

http://hrw.org/doc/?t=americas_pub&c=brazil