More than 40 prisoners killed in Amazon prison gang clashes

Forty-two inmates were killed at three different prisons in the capital of Brazil’s northern Amazonas state on Monday, a day after 15 died during fighting among prisoners at a fourth prison in the same city.

The Amazonas state prison agency said all 42 prisoners found dead in Manaus on Monday showed signs of asphyxia.

Prison clashes often spread rapidly in Brazil, where drug gangs have de facto control over nearly all jails.

In January 2017, nearly 150 prisoners died during three weeks of violence in north and northeastern Brazil, as local gangs backed by Brazil’s two largest drug factions - the First Capital Command and the Red Command - butchered one another. Many of those victims had their heads cut off or their hearts and intestines ripped out.

On Sunday, 15 inmates were killed during a riot at Manaus’s Anísio Jobim prison complex, where 56 prisoners died in the violence two years earlier.

Local authorities said had prisoners begun fighting among themselves before noon on Sunday, and security reinforcements were rushed in and managed to regain control within 45 minutes.

Little information was released about Monday’s killings.

Brazil’s justice and public security ministry said it was sending a federal task force to help local officials handle the situation.

“I just spoke with [the justice] minister Sérgio Moro, who is already sending a prison intervention team to the state of Amazonas, so that he can help us in this moment of crisis and a problem that is national: the problem of prisons,” the Amazonas state governor, Wilson Lima, said.

Several drug-trafficking and other criminal gangs in Brazil run much of their day-to-day business from prisons, where they often have wide sway. The 2017 killings were largely gang-related, prompting authorities to increase efforts to separate factions and frequently transfer prisoners.

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has vowed to regain control of the country’s prisons – along with building many more jails.

Authorities have not yet said whether gang wars were behind the latest blood-letting.

Moro had to send a federal task force to help tame violence in Ceará state in January that local officials said was ordered by crime gang leaders angered by plans to impose tighter controls in the state’s prisons.