IN BRAZIL, STATE POLICE ARE A KILLING FORCE

RIO BRANCO, Brazil - The bodies have turned up one or two at a time, in
ditches and tall grass on the edge of town. Most of the dead have been
thieves and drug dealers, who in many cases across Brazil were tortured for
hours or mutilated - a hand or arm chopped off - before being shot in the
head at close range.

State civil police investigated the cases, and rarely arrested anyone. Now,
federal police and human rights activists say they know why: The civil and
military police were themselves the killers.

Earlier this month, one human rights group reported that civil and military
police in Latin America's most populous nation had participated in 2,500
killings since 1997, a figure that some activists and federal law
enforcement officials say is a conservative estimate. In Acre, one of the
most violent states in Brazil, federal officials estimate that police have
killed 500 people since 1997. In the state of Goias, in a cluster of poor
towns around the nation's capital, Brasilia, authorities believe police
have executed more than 100 people during the same time period. In the
northeast state of Bahia, police are said to have killed some 160 residents
since 1997. And those figures are just from three of Brazil's 26 states.

Over the past six months, some 50 police officers have been arrested in
connection with slayings in their states. In the most notorious case, 42
Acre police officers are accused of participating in an extensive and
vicious organized crime ring that operated out of Rio Branco, the state
capital. The ring's leader allegedly was Hildebrando Pascoal, a national
congressman and military police colonel, who was arrested last September.
He has denied wrongdoing.

The cases have drawn new attention to an old problem in Brazil - corrupt
and deadly police preying on poor communities, these days often in consort
with politicians and merchants who use officers as neighborhood vigilantes
and as enforcers in drug trafficking networks.

Human rights activists see the cases as evidence that the Brazilian
government has done little to curb the civil and military police since
off-duty officers killed eight street children in Rio de Janiero in 1993,
an incident that ignited international outrage.

"What has happened is that the police are under nobody's control," said
Nelson Pellegrino, a member of the Brazilian legislature's human rights
commission. "They operate freely. So of course they become involved in
crimes."

In virtually all of the recently discovered incidents, civil and military
police officers have preyed on towns where unemployment is high and
education levels low. Residents often live without basic services such as
indoor plumbing and must endure dilapidated schools and poor medical
facilities. They are often powerless to resist the police. And it does not
help that the police typically are ill-trained, poorly educated and among
Brazil's lowest-paid public servants.

"When you give someone like this a badge and a gun, suddenly he feels like
a very powerful person," said Jim Cavallaro, a veteran human rights
activist here.

Numerous cities have been burdened with rogue police for years. In states
such as Rio Grande do Norte, for example, a group known as the Golden Boys,
and its branches, allegedly have killed dozens of people since the early
1980s.

Over the years Acre, the country's westernmost state, has become synonymous
with police lawlessness. Its crippled rubber industry, its location on
Brazil's border with Peru and Bolivia and its vast stretches of jungle have
made it an ideal place for corruption to flourish.

For much of its history, it was known mainly for its rubber tappers, the
most famous of whom is slain activist Chico Mendes. Throughout the 1980s,
the industry continued its decades-long decline, leaving Acre among the
country's most economically depressed states.

At the same time, Acre grew increasingly violent, with civil police in
particular connected to numerous killings, often ordered by crime-weary
merchants or by landowners in property battles with rubber tappers.

By the 1990s, drug trafficking had become a potent industry in Acre. The
state, with close to a half-million residents, had become a prime transport
route for cocaine moving from Peru and Bolivia to Colombia, as
poorly-watched borders and thick pockets of jungle allowed traffickers to
carve out secret roads and landing strips.

As drug trafficking grew, so did the piles of bodies on the outskirts of
Rio Branco. Typically, the victims were young working-class men, some of
them criminals. In general, according to prosecutors and human rights
activists, police received the equivalent of $1,000 or more for each
killing. Here in Acre, where police have not had raises in at least five
years, the average officer makes about $300 a month. Civil police, who
perform investigations, tend to be paid slightly less than military police,
who patrol communities.

There is ample evidence, prosecutors say, that the police were ordered to
make their killings as brutal as possible. Sometimes victims had been
stabbed or shot repeatedly; one young man, now a prosecution witness, was
hit with 18 bullets and survived. On other occasions, police sawed off, or
hacked off, victims' fingers or arms or hands. Occasionally they
decapitated them.

In one case, Antonio Carlos Moura, 23, went missing in June 1996, shortly
after police arrested him in connection with the fatal stabbing of his
neighbor, a female school teacher. Moura, who washed cars for a living,
denied killing her. But police said at the time that a bloody T-shirt found
in his home indicated otherwise.

Weeks later, Moura's headless body surfaced. He apparently had been dragged
along the ground by a car. His hands reportedly had been hacked off, his
tattoos scraped away. His head was found a few days later in a roadside
ditch in Rio Branco.

Authorities now say that Moura was innocent. They believe that military
police killed the teacher because she had threatened to report that
traffickers were recruiting children at her school to sell drugs.

"We knew he was innocent, so in that sense there has been justice," said
Moura's brother, Francisco da Silva Moura, 32. But "my mother is still
really scared. She's afraid that the same people who did that to her son
will do the same thing to her. They can kill anyone."

Prosecutors and public security officials believe Francisco Moura and the
citizens of Acre can breathe a bit easier these days, with the arrest of
Pascoal and the military police officers. They admit, however, that it will
be difficult to convict Pascoal because the trial is being held in Rio
Branco, where many still fear him and his family. Already, one prosecution
witness has recanted his testimony.

Pascoal's attorney, Oscar Luchesi, said that the government "has no proof
that Hildebrando did anything wrong" and said political enemies are behind
the prosecution of his client, who was expelled by the Brazilian Congress
last October.

Naluh Gouveia, a state legislator and founder of the Committee Against
Impunity, said that the cases are critical for restoring the people's
confidence in the justice system. A committee survey found that only 32
percent of respondents have faith in the state's police and courts.

Salete Maia, now Acre's secretary of public security, said the state is
attempting to overhaul its military and civil police forces. She said that
Acre is establishing new training standards - she said that many officers
cannot read - and police will receive raises next year.

Francisco Moura says the arrests are a good first step, but not enough. "If
someone kills, they must be put into prison," Moura said. "We have to act
according to the law. The law can't favor the rich over the poor, like they
have been doing. Everybody is equal. Everybody is a human being."