Mobs in Brazil Lynch Many Crime Suspects : Violence: Vigilantes react to rampant crime, poverty and police corruption. No one has been arrested in any of the slayings.

SALVADOR, Brazil —  Brazilians fed up with rampant crime and turnstile justice have turned to vigilantism, forming lynch mobs and killing suspects in record numbers.

No exact figures are available, but some officials say more than 500 people will die in lynch-mob executions in 1991, three times more than in any previous year.

National attention was focused on lynchings Nov. 23, when 5,000 residents of Matupa, a remote city in the western state of Mato Grosso, attacked three prisoners in a police car. They had just been arrested for trying to rob a rancher’s home and holding three women and four children hostage.

In the space of two hours, the mob beat the three men with metal rods and rocks, poured gasoline on them and burned them alive.

A videotape made by a witness was shown on national television and President Fernando Collor de Mello ordered an investigation.

No arrests were made, but the videotaper was charged with failing to aid fellow citizens. The charge was dropped later.

In January, 1,500 stormed a jail in Andira, a town in the southern state of Parana, and tried to kill two prisoners accused of killing a taxi driver.

Riot troops repulsed the attackers. When hundreds of taxi drivers threatened another attack, the suspects were moved to a top-security prison hundreds of miles away.

Throughout Brazil, ordinary citizens are making their own law, killing suspects with ropes, stones, ice picks, farm tools, knives and iron bars. Police appear powerless to stop the violence.

No one has been arrested in any of the lynchings because a code of silence keeps police in the dark, said special investigator Hermes Ribeiro. He is based in Salvador, capital of Bahia, the state where mob violence is most common.

“We can only stop it when soldiers get there before the attack begins,” he said. “The only other way would be to machine-gun the crowd.”

Sergio Habib, secretary of the state Public Security Department, said: “This wave of lynchings reflects widespread mistrust of the judicial and law-enforcement system.”

Mob “justice” arose in Brazil in the 18th Century, when slaves or alleged religious heretics sometimes were lynched in public squares.

It reappeared in the late 1970s and increased in the 1980s, especially in interior villages and the expanding slums around major cities, said Paulo Menandro, a professor at Federal University of Espirito Santo state.

The brutality reflects poverty, the disintegration of families and police corruption, all of which have grown worse during Brazil’s most severe economic crisis.

Surveys indicate that one-third of the country’s 150 million people live in poverty and nearly half of all workers are paid less than $30 a week.

“Brazilians thirst for a scapegoat for their misery,” said Helio Bicudo, a legislator from the leftist Workers Party. “That’s why they jump to lynch anyone, even a car thief.”

Four-digit annual inflation, a $123-billion foreign debt and deep cuts in federal spending have left welfare and law enforcement systems unable to cope with rising crime.

Even a nation accustomed to violence appears shaken by the record numbers of kidnapings, murders, rapes and organized raids on banks and apartment buildings in rich and poor districts alike.

News media report huge backlogs in the courts, overcrowded jails, the apparent immunity of crime bosses and failure of police to act on thousands of pending arrest warrants.

“People don’t see bandits being punished, so they feel helpless,” said Edval Passos, head of the Bahia state human rights commission. “The frustration leads to collective madness.”

A nationwide survey in May by the Datafolha polling institute indicated that 60% of Brazilians would favor adopting the death penalty if a plebiscite was held.

In Bahia, an impoverished state of 11.7 million people on the northeast coast, a lynching occurs about every three days. Half the people in Bahia are illiterate and one-third of the working population are unemployed.

Bahia had seven lynchings in 1987, 94 last year and 70 in the first half of 1991, the state Public Security Department reported.

Race often is an element in lynchings. A study by Jose de Souza Martins, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo, found that 79% of lynch mob victims were black or of mixed race.

Francisco Netto, city police chief in Salvador, said police need more money for personnel, training and equipment if they are to deal with mob violence.

Joao Ferreira, a sociologist with a human rights group based in Salvador, said more police are not the answer.

“The police have always had absolute power to insulate the elite from violence in the slums,” he said. “Where has it gotten us?”

Paradoxically, he said, the police have given the lynchers an example.

During military rule in 1964-1985, death squads linked with the the police dragged political prisoners and criminal suspects out of jails and killed them.

Many of the criminal suspects were said to be members of rival police factions allegedly involved in drug trafficking or auto theft.

Today, even housewives and children join lynch mobs.

On June 14 in Santa Maria de Vitoria, 680 miles west of Salvador, 30 men and women in six pickup trucks stopped a police car transporting two men who had confessed to killing a rancher.

They beat one of the criminals to death and set his body afire. They shot the other in the neck, but the officers managed to get him to a hospital.

Thirty people, masked and armed, invaded the hospital’s emergency ward the next evening, wrapped the man in a bedsheet, took him to the outskirts of town and burned him to death.

Sometimes, mobs choose the wrong victim.

At Porto Velho, in the western jungle, 150 taxi drivers took 15-year-old Marcelo Souza de Santos from his home on April 4, believing that he was involved in robbing a fellow driver.

In the street, as his younger brother watched, they beat him to death with iron bars.

Witnesses confirmed later that Santos had not been near the robbery scene. Police said he had no criminal record.