Word: ganging
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...enough to bring a place like Sao Paulo, Brazil's most important state and South America's largest city, to its knees with just a phone call from their jail cells. Just as important, the five-day-long attacks that left 137 people dead are evidence that what these gang bosses do over the next few months will not only affect the day-to-day lives of 40 million Paulistas - they could also help decide the upcoming election for Brazil's president...
...Brazil - especially its second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro - has seen gang rampages before. But the mayhem in Sao Paulo set an astonishing new benchmark. It erupted last week after authorities transferred 756 gang-affiliated prisoners in an attempt to thwart what they believed would be a state-wide prison rebellion on the eve of Mother's Day, when family visits often provoke unrest. The PCC's reaction was swift. On Thursday night, bandits armed with grenades and machine guns attacked police stations and left five officers dead. Over the weekend they stepped up their attacks with a series...
...Since taking office in 2003, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged to tackle both Brazil's security malaise and the inexcusable social conditions that have bred the gang violence. His opponent in the upcoming October election, former Sao Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, has boasted the state had triumphed over organized crime. The Sao Paulo crisis is likely to shine the spotlight on both their records."You can't say the PCC want to benefit one candidate or another, but there 's no doubt that they are smart and well-informed and that they know authorities are more vulnerable...
...show signs of real change, he has traveled abroad in search of aid and investment. And at home he has held frank conversations with members of Haiti's fractured population, trying to win support from an antagonistic business sector, a hostile political community, skeptical media directors, and even gang leaders who had, for months on end, besieged the capital with kidnappings and criminal violence...
...neighborhoods and put somewhere else, criminologists have found. In the more hopeful scenario, people who parachute into better neighborhoods commit less violent crime. That theory posits that places like New Orleans, where poverty is extreme, are inherently crimogenic--which is to say, they produce deviant behavior, just like alcohol. Gangs are also crimogenic. When people leave gangs, they are generally less violent than they were as gang members. In neighborhoods and gangs, in other words, violence--and peace--is contagious...