This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 RIO DE JANEIRO 001238 
 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR WHA/BSC, WHA/PDA-LGOULD, DS/ITA AND 
DS/IP/WHA 
DEPT FOR INL 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: ASEC SNAR KCRM CASC BR
SUBJECT:  DRUGLORD ORDERS RIO BUS BURNED 
 
¶1.  Cariocas (Rio de Janeiro residents) awoke 
November 30 to a gruesome news story in the daily, O 
Globo, concerning the death of five passengers and 
wounding of fourteen others on a bus the previous 
night.  In a city where police brutality and drug 
gang violence have become almost daily routine, the 
story that twelve drug gang members had burned the 
bus to seek revenge on the Military Police who had 
killed one of their members the same day in the same 
favela, Bras de Pina, was shocking.  The bus was 
apparently chosen at random; one of the armed gang 
members refused to let the bus driver open the back 
exit while other gang members poured gasoline on the 
bus floor and set fire to it.  Only a few people 
managed to escape through the windows.  Given the 
intensity of the blaze, the victims, burned alive, 
can only be identified through dental records or DNA 
testing (which could take up to one year). 
 
¶2.  This incident raised the indignation about the 
lack of public security to a new level: talk rolled 
through the city, on the radio, in the elevators, on 
the sidewalks.  While civilians are frequent victims 
of police and criminal behaviour, a new level of 
violence was achieved with this act: instead of 
stray bullets from raids, assaults in the home and 
on the street, carjackings and "lightning 
kidnappings" which appear random, this was an 
intentional act taken against innocent civilians. 
Julita Lemgruber, director of the Center for Safety 
and Citizenship Studies at the University Candido 
Mendes, was cited as saying that if the state did 
not respond promptly there would be more and/or 
worse violence to come.  Rubem Cesar Fernandes, 
coordinator of the NGO Viva Rio (which works in the 
city's favelas), stated that never before had the 
city seen such a barbarous act. 
 
¶3.  On December 1, police discovered four gang 
members shot dead, in an abandoned automobile.  A 13- 
year old illiterate, drug-using, orphaned female, 
detained on December 3, confessed to being part of 
the gang that attacked the 350 bus on Passeio-Iraja 
bus line and identified the four dead males as 
having participated in the attack.  They were 
reportedly ordered murdered by a gang leader named 
Mica, who is vying for control of the gang with the 
head of drug trafficking in the Morro da Fe, Lorde, 
who ordered the original bus attack.  Police, 
however, are also investigating other possible 
explanations for these acts, such as retaliation 
against a crooked cop attempt to extort the gang or 
Brazil's most feared druglord, Fernandinho Beira-Mar 
of the Red Command (Comando Vermelho), ordering the 
hit from his maximum security seclusion in the north 
of Brazil for unknown reasons.  An anonymous phone 
call to the police, ostensibly by a Red Command 
member, said the four dead gang members were not 
shot in the head, specifically so that they could be 
recognized both by the victims and the police. 
 
¶4.  On December 2, Amnesty International published a 
report entitled "They Come in Shooting," criticizing 
repression-oriented public security in Brazil, using 
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo as exampla of cities 
where police "overkill" encourages a concentration 
of violence in the shantytowns (favelas) where poor 
people live.  But poor people, as these recent 
events demonstrate, are just as much victims of the 
barbarity of drug-related violence as of police 
violence.  The irony is that four gang members 
involved in the bus attack were killed within 24 
hours and seven others are actively being sought by 
the Red Command - prompt retributive vicious justice 
offered to the police so that the business of drug 
trafficking can get back to normal in the favela and 
the police can return to their barracks.  Letters to 
the Editor of O Globo are again calling for the use 
of the military, the same call that happened during 
the Easter 2004 war in Rocinha, to take back control 
of the city. 
 
¶5.  As Marcelo Itagiba, the State Secretary for 
Public Security, says with frequency:  The police 
cannot address the root causes of violence in 
Brazilian society - lack of education, lack of 
housing, lack of basic infrastructure, lack of jobs, 
lack of hope - that make the poor particularly 
vulnerable to victimizing and being victimized. 
 
¶6.  This cable was cleared by Embassy Brasilia. 
 
ATKINS