By Ricardo Brito
BRASILIA (Reuters) – Thirteen people have died in gang violence in the past four days in Porto Velho, the capital of Rondonia state in the Brazilian Amazon, where gang members have clashed with police, raising concerns about the growing power of gangs in the region.
Eight people were killed in attacks by criminal gangs and another five died in clashes with the police since Tuesday morning, according to Rondonia’s security department.
Criminals set fire to 20 buses, most of them belonging to schools, likely to protest police retaliation. The attacks prompted authorities to limit the hours when public transportation is available and assign police escorts to city buses.
The crisis led the federal government to send national public security force troops to Rondonia to help the state police contain the wave of violence for at least 90 days.
Porto Velho police claim that the attacks are a retaliation by the Comando Vermelho criminal faction against police operations in a housing complex that the gang controls in the city, according to G1 news portal.
Though the Comando Vermelho was created in the state of Rio de Janeiro, thousands of miles away, it has become the most powerful gang in the Amazon region in recent years.
A recent report by Brazilian Public Security Forum, a think tank, showed crime rates are rising fast in the Amazon, home of the world’s largest rainforest. In 2023, the region registered 34 homicides for every 100,000 people, almost twice the national rate.
While Brazil’s Amazon region has for decades struggled with conflicts over land as farms expanded into the forest, the more recent violence is connected to disputes among gangs to control key drug trade routes that connect cocaine producers to consumers, said Renato Sergio de Lima, the think tank’s president.
Rondonia borders Bolivia, a key cocaine producer, and has recently become a key drug trade route, police investigations show. In the last decade, police seized 20 tons of cocaine in the state, one of the largest volumes in the country.
“The Amazon is a perfect environment for crime. The gangs control the territory and define the rules,” Lima said. “Eventually, the police show up.”
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito; Writing by Isabel Teles; Editing by Pedro Fonseca, Manuela Andreoni and Alistair Bell)
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