Brazilian cop jailed for death squad massacre

It was a killing spree that sent fear through a city already brutalized by daily bloodshed involving police and organized crime. Twenty-nine people were shot dead in Rio de Janeiro by a squad of off-duty police officers, apparently in retaliation for a government drive on police corruption. Hours before the massacre the police officers were seen drinking beer and singing karaoke songs in a local bar. Then they went on a rampage in a borrowed car, shooting men, women and children at random. This week Carlos Jorge Carvalho, an officer who pleaded not guilty, was convicted and sentenced to 543 years in prison for his role in the drive-by deaths in March 2005. Known as the Baixada Fluminense Massacre, after the suburb where it happened, it was the worst atrocity involving Rio's notoriously violent and corrupt police force. The sentence is a rare and speedy ruling in a country where rogue elements in the security forces often act with impunity, faced with an inefficient legal system and public indifference to what happens inside the country's violence-wracked favelas, or slums. Prosecutors believe the massacre was carried out as a show of force by officers after the arrest of eight colleagues as part of a crack down on police corruption. The killings took place over two hours after shots were first fired from a car on a bar in Rio's poor northern suburbs, killing ten patrons, including three children. Carvalho, 32, gave three contradictory accounts of where he was at the time, including looking after his sick father and visiting a former girlfriend, which he had failed to mention at first because he is married. Witnesses placed him at the crime scenes and said that he had fired the weapon. The blood of two victims and shell casings from the gun were found in a car he had borrowed that night. The jury convicted him unanimously. The 543-year sentence is symbolic because under Brazilian law the maximum amount of time a person can spend in prison is 30 years. Sentencing Carvalho, Elizabeth Louro, the judge, said she was astonished that the accused "is a military police officer, which, in principle, should inspire respect for the law and, in particular, human life." Families of the victims celebrated the verdict by letting off fireworks on the steps of the courthouse. Marcelo Muniz, the prosecutor, called the sentence "a strong blow against impunity. People have to start to believe that justice exists here." Endemic violence in Rio's slums, linked mainly to the drug trade, makes the city one of the most dangerous in the world. Poorly paid and trained police are frequently involved in gun battles with heavily armed teenage gang members. Residents of Rio's favelas have long claimed that the police treat everyone living in the slums as bandidos and, rather than police these neighborhoods, restrict themselves to carrying out periodic military-style raids to quell upsurges in gang fighting or to search for drugs or arms. Human rights groups claim the authorities and the wider population turn a blind eye to summary executions by police officers of slum dwellers during these raids. In 1993 police officers shot dead 21 people in Rio's Vigario Geral favela, in what was believed to be retaliation for the killing of colleagues allegedly involved in drug dealing. The sentence handed down in the Baixada Fluminense Massacre follows accusations that São Paulo's police force executed dozens of suspected gang members during violent confrontations in May between the state's security forces and the Primeiro Comando da Capital–the First Command of the Capital, São Paulo's biggest gang.