An unprecedented escape puts maximum security prisons in Brazil to the test

Two dangerous prisoners who were serving their sentences in one of the five maximum security prisons spread across Brazil escaped early Tuesday morning.

The prisoners, imprisoned in a prison located in Mossoró, in the interior of the State of Rio Grande do Norte, were members of the Red Command, one of the most powerful Brazilian criminal groups.

The escape - the first in the federal penitentiary system created in 2006 by the Government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva due to the inability of state authorities to manage the prisons - puts this maximum security network to the test and represents a serious crisis for the new Minister of Justice and Public Security, Ricardo Lewandowski, who has been in office for 15 days.

Both inmates were transferred four months ago to this super-supervised prison after leading a riot in a prison in Acre that left five inmates dead, three of them decapitated.

The first indications collected by investigators indicate, according to the local press, that the prisoners were able to take advantage of the fact that the yard is in a renovation process to obtain construction materials that would help them escape.

They allegedly made a hole in the ceiling of the cell, according to the newspaper

.

The authorities have not given details about how the escape of Rogério da Silva Mendonça, 36, nicknamed

, and Deibson Cabral Nascimento, 34,

, occurred .

Both were subjected to the harshest regime.

“If the security protocols had been respected, there would be no possibility of an escape occurring,” highlighted the national secretary of penitentiary policy, André García, this Thursday in an appearance in Mossoró.

“We do not rule out any of the possibilities: relaxation [of the guards], facilitation [of the escape by the guards] or whatever the investigation indicates.

I can not say anything more".

Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, 75 years old, recently retired as a judge of the Supreme Court and who assumed the Justice portfolio on the 1st, ordered the members of the management of the Mossoró prison to be immediately suspended from their duties.

He has also decreed that, for now, visits and going out to the patio, what they call sunbathing here, are over.

The governor of Río Grande do Norte, Fátima Bezerra, has deployed a tracking operation that includes road patrols, helicopter flights over the area and notification to the neighboring states of Paraíba and Ceará.

The governor belongs to the Workers' Party, the same party as President Lula, who is on an official trip to Egypt.

There are five federal prisons and they are located in as many states.

They were created to isolate and better monitor the top bosses of the main criminal gangs in Brazil, the First Capital Command (PCC), which is a kind of brotherhood of criminals;

the Red Command, and other local groups.

The first two are dedicated to drug trafficking, among other illicit businesses, and dominate prisons in different corners of the country.

The federal penitentiary system is also the counterpoint to the ordinary network of prisons, which depends on the States, and which often translates into prisons managed by the criminals themselves in which there is plenty of violence and even the most basic things are missing, sometimes even food. .

And if the prisoner does not have relatives to bring him food or personal hygiene products, he is absolutely abandoned without any protection.

In maximum security prisons like the one where the escape occurred or where the top leader of the PCC, Marco Wilians Herbas Camacho,

, in Brasilia, is imprisoned, the prisoner receives a tracksuit, sneakers, a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

Of course, there is no gym or kitchens.

The patio is covered by a mesh to prevent air leaks.

The water in the shower turns off after five minutes, and they receive razor blades that they must return as soon as they shave.

They can have books, but no lighters and smoking is not allowed.

They are extremely different prisons from ordinary ones.

But in Brazil there is also a third, truly striking modality, prisons in which the guards are the inmates themselves, a minority but consolidated experience.

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