Like policemen in almost every U.S. city, the police of Rio de Janeiro are convinced that their country's legal system makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to convict criminals. Furthermore, there is no capital punishment, and no matter how serious the offense, a convict never serves more than 30 years. Some of Rio's cops think that the coddling of criminals has gone so far as to become unendurable. Taking the law into their own hands, they have formed small, clandestine death squads, and now execute any criminal who they think has cheated the law.
Last year nearly 200 criminals were found dead in and around Rio, and the death rate shows no sign of slackening so far this year. In the last two weeks, nine new murders of hoodlums were in the local news. The details of their deaths were grimly familiar. Found on lonely roads outside the city, some of the victims had their arms tied behind their backs. The bodies of at least two were marked with cigar burns. Two more had nylon ropes looped around their necks. One man had been shot five times in the mouth, another three times in the neck; a third had been riddled with 38 bullets of various calibers. In all, 102 bullet holes were found in the nine bodies. It was a foregone conclusion that the torture murders would never be solved.
Red Rose. In official statements, Rio police have frequently and vociferously denied that they have anything to do with the killings; they claim that warring gangs are to blame. Last week, however, a TIME correspondent reported that several lower-and middle-echelon police officers have admitted to him that death squads are indeed manned by off-duty cops. They claim that the majority of hoodlum killings are disguised gangland slayings, but they concede that many are summary police executions. According to one informant, who was a charter member, the first squad was organized in 1958. It was a tightly knit group of 16 policemen who rubbed out an average of a hood a week for six years. When their most famous member was finally killed by a gangster, the squad stayed together long enough to avenge his death (the gangster's body was ravaged by some 100 slugs), then gradually went out of business.
It has now been replaced by less tightly organized groups that have sprung up spontaneously in different police districts. According to one police captain, victims are usually murderers, armed robbers, dope peddlers or auto thieves. A man is generally marked for death on the basis of his record and the likelihood that he will escape just punishment in the courts. Once condemned, he is picked up, sometimes as he leaves a police station after being released for lack of evidence. Usually he is taken to a remote jail, where he is held under a false name for a week in case his disappearance upsets any important friends.
If the kidnaping goes unnoticed, the victim is taken to an isolated spot, beaten or tortured, and then killed by a salvo of bullets fired by all the assembled cops. A coup de grace is finally administered above the ear, and often a piece of paper is left by the body bearing a skull and crossbones and the initials E.M.—the sign of Esquadrao da Morte. Sometimes there is also a note saying "I pushed marijuana" or "I was a car thief."