Brazil Ends Jail Standoff; 600 Hostages Freed

BUENOS AIRES —  Riot police stormed a prison Wednesday where armed inmates were holding about 600 hostages near Sao Paulo, Brazil, ending a three-day standoff that was the latest in an alarming wave of holiday prison riots and escapes throughout the nation.

Throwing smoke bombs, riot police using clubs and dogs overpowered the inmates in an apparently well-executed operation that was launched about 6:15 p.m. and averted the considerable death tolls of previous prison standoffs in Brazil. State officials confirmed that one police officer suffered a leg injury, and there were unconfirmed reports that 10 inmates and three other police officers were hurt.

There were no reported injuries to the hostages being held at the Sorocaba House of Detention, who included 16 prison guards and hundreds of women and children who had been visiting inmates. It was the largest number of hostages taken in the troubled history of a penal system described as “degrading” and “near-apocalyptic” by human rights advocates.

Police attacked because they learned that the inmates were digging an escape tunnel and because they feared for the hostages’ safety, said Danilo Cesar, chief of prison security for Sao Paulo state.

“The result was satisfactory,” Cesar said in a telephone interview. “The police only went in to ensure the well-being of the inmates and the hostages. There was no resistance. It all went as expected.”

In a hopeful sign about 4:30 p.m., a group of women and children was released by the 20 hostage-takers, who were armed with revolvers, clubs and knives. But negotiations bogged down, police said, and the inmates failed to comply with a promise to surrender in exchange for transfers to other facilities.

The siege began during visiting hours Sunday when two inmates tried to escape disguised as women and set off a shootout that killed an inmate and an inmate’s wife, who allegedly smuggled in wigs, dresses and weapons.

The uprising focused international attention on a social problem that has become as routine as it is dire.

Overwhelmed by overcrowding, violence, corruption, squalor and bureaucratic breakdowns, Brazilian prisons average nine escape attempts daily and three revolts a month, justice officials say. Populous Sao Paulo state, home to more than a third of Brazil’s 160,000 inmates, experienced a 147% rise in uprisings this year, according to newspaper reports.

The penal system, Latin America’s largest, is perennially on the verge of explosion, said James Cavallaro, the Brazil representative of Human Rights Watch.

“It is an extremely short fuse,” said Cavallaro, whose organization has visited about 30 facilities in five states for an in-depth study. “Inmates see this as a possible way out. A lot of these revolts are protests by inmates who want to be moved somewhere else.”

In a long and grotesque litany of incidents, inmates have conducted macabre lotteries to select fellow prisoners who are killed to protest overcrowding; police commandos were charged with murder for slaughtering 111 mutinous inmates in Sao Paulo in 1992; and 18 people suffocated to death when guards forced 51 inmates into one cell in 1989.

Tensions rise during the holidays. A nationwide flurry of disturbances in December included a Christmas Day blood bath in the northeast state of Ceara, where nine escapees took hostages and died after a car chase and shootout with police.

The crisis is most severe in police lockups and detention centers such as the one in Sorocaba, where authorities said after Wednesday’s raid that they would transfer the 20 hostage-takers to a top-security penitentiary.

Sorocaba and other often-primitive facilities lack security measures, recreation space and rehabilitation programs. Although they are intended to be temporary detention centers, they end up housing inmates--convicts and accused alike--for months and years. Guards cram as many as 40 inmates into cells designed for eight, according to Cavallaro.

“We have been in places where human beings shouldn’t be kept for 10 minutes, let alone days or months,” he said. “We’ve been in cells in Sao Paulo where there are more people in the cell than horizontal space, so they take turns sleeping. The medical conditions are abysmal, and inmates complain that guards ignore them when they are sick. That is not unrelated to the fact that guards won’t open cells because they are afraid of being taken hostage.”

Prison reform advocates blame structural breakdowns. Many inmates who are entitled to parole or release remain behind bars because of poor record-keeping. The state prison bureaucracy blocks transfers from local jails to control its own excess population, Cavallaro said. A torpid court system delays trials for years; some inmates awaiting trial in the state of Amazonas have served more time than their potential sentences, said Joanne Mariner, associate counsel and prison expert for Human Rights Watch.

Remarkably, though, Brazil compares well in this regard with nations such as Honduras and Venezuela, where more than two-thirds of inmates are awaiting trial, Mariner said. And as in other Latin American systems, Brazil’s humane policies allow prisoners extensive visits with their families, whom inmates protect with an ironclad code of respect.

“It is very unusual for family members to be taken hostage,” Mariner said. “Family members are sacred. Inmates can’t go shirtless in the broiling heat out of respect for family members. There are special toilets for family members in some prisons.”

The taking of family members as hostages made the Sorocaba standoff especially tense. The television images were alternately tranquil and grim: As children kicked a soccer ball in the patio, a group of muscular inmates with shirts hooding their heads beat a hostage on a rooftop.

Recognizing the need for urgent nationwide action, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has more than doubled the prison budget and launched a drive to build 52 new prisons. Authorities are steering nonviolent convicts into sentences requiring community service rather than prison time and are trying to reduce the number of delayed trials, paroles and releases that cause anger to boil over with increasing regularity.

“The holidays definitely play a role,” Mariner said. “The inmates feel they have a right to be out. They are spending Christmas in a cell with 20 other miserable people. A lot of what they are demanding is justified.”

Paula Gobbi of The Times’ Rio de Janeiro Bureau contributed to this report.