In May 2006, Brazil's São Paulo state decided it was a brilliant idea to transfer nearly 800 suspected gang members to maximum-security prisons. The local crime group, the PCC, responded with a wave of prison riots and attacks on law enforcement, killing 59 police and prison officers. Over the next nine days, police retaliated by killing more than 500 people - officially described as shootouts with "criminals," but human rights groups and forensic studies say it was largely executions, including of innocent people.
Twenty years later, the vast majority of those murders remain unsolved, and victims' relatives are still demanding answers from the Brazilian state. The country's superior court of justice is expected to rule soon on long-sought compensation for the victims. "There is no amount of money that can pay for the life of a child," said Débora Maria da Silva, founder of the Mothers of May Movement, which brings together relatives of the victims.
Da Silva learned of her eldest son Edson's death, aged 29, when a radio presenter read out a list of those killed in "confrontations with police." She spent years tracking down a witness and had his body exhumed and reburied in 2012. She discovered that Edson, a street cleaner, had been approached by eight police officers at a petrol station. "When he said he was a worker and had done nothing wrong, they beat him," she said. He was shot five times and killed. After legal battles, the state was ordered to pay her £72,000 ($97,000) in compensation and a pension equivalent to one-third of the monthly minimum wage (£80). The judge ruled police responded to the PCC attacks in a manner "violent, unreasonable and indiscriminate and therefore illegal." But none of the officers involved were ever identified.
"The crimes of May 2006 were one of the gravest chapters in Brazil's history," said lawyer Gabriel Sampaio, a director at NGO Conectas. Even killings of public officials saw little resolution - a recent Folha de S Paulo report identified only 15 convictions, such as that of PCC leader Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho (known as Marcola), sentenced to 50 years for ordering the execution of a firefighter. Only one police officer was convicted: a corporal found guilty of murder for opening fire on three young men chatting on a street.
Forensic reports from 124 bodies - all recorded as alleged "shootouts" - found most gunshots hit highly lethal areas, fired at close range and from above. The forensic expert concluded this "points to a scenario more consistent with execution than with a gunfight." Only 6% of victims had criminal records; most were young Black men from poor neighbourhoods. São Paulo police did not respond to requests for comment but maintain all killings were investigated "in a regular and rigorous manner."
Meanwhile, the PCC has grown from São Paulo's largest criminal faction into one of Latin America's largest, expanding cocaine exports to over 20 countries. "The state's response was so misguided that it produced no restraint to the organisation," said Sampaio. In 2018, a public prosecutor filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for victims' families and 110 injured survivors; the state court rejected it, and the case now awaits resumption at Brazil's superior court on 10 June.
"There needs to be an apology," said Débora, whose movement's name references Argentina's Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. "The Brazilian state continues to produce 'mothers of May' and we cannot say there is democracy here while Black people and the poor continue to be persecuted and killed by the police."