Problems in Brazil
I had written about Brazil having
agricultural problems (financial and political).
Now it seems that rioting has started in Sao Paulo.
From
mcarthurweb:
Sao Paulo, Brazil, is failing as a political entity:Masked men attacked bars, banks and police stations with machine guns. Gangs set buses on fire. And inmates at dozens of prisons took guards hostage in an unprecedented four-day wave of violence around South America's largest city that left more than 80 dead by Monday.
With many jails still under inmate control, officials worried the violence could spread 220 miles northeast to Rio de Janeiro, where 40,000 police were put on high alert and extra patrols were dispatched to slums where drug gang leaders live.
The violence was triggered by an attempt to isolate gang leaders, who control many of Sao Paulo's teeming, notoriously corrupt prisons, by transferring eight of them Thursday to a high-security facility hundreds of miles away from this city of 18 million people.
The leaders of the First Capital Command gang, or PCC, reportedly used cell phones to order the attacks. Gang members began riddling police cars with bullets, hurling grenades at police stations and attacking officers in their homes and after work hangouts.
Then, on Sunday night, the gang employed a new tactic: sending gunmen onto buses, ordering passengers and drivers off and torching the vehicles.
Thousands of drivers refused to work Monday, leaving an estimated 2.9 million people scrambling to find a way to their jobs. While most stores and businesses remained open, the city's normally clogged downtown streets were largely free of traffic and pedestrians...
News source was the
San Jose Mercury News
Once a very progressive wealthy nation now sliding down the slippery slope of politics and "revolution".
Posted by DaveH at May 16, 2006 6:01 PM