RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Police in Brazil’s Amazonas state said that they engaged in a shootout with over 50 criminals following a fight for territory between drug gangs, leaving 17 alleged traffickers dead.
Local witnesses said that the shooting started early Wednesday morning in the Crespo region of Amazonas’ capital city Manaus. The area is known for ongoing violence between different drug cartels fighting for control of the lucrative drug market.
Authorities said they were responding to intelligence that 50 armed men belonging to the Familia do Norte drug cartel were en route to Crespo. Their goal was to invade the community and wrest control from their competitor, the Comando Vermelho cartel.
On arriving at the site and surrounding the traffickers, authorities allege that the men refused to give themselves up and engaged with police. The Commander of Amazonas Police, Coronel Ayrton Ferreira do Norte, said that they gave the traffickers every opportunity to surrender.
“We responded to the call with the intention of preserving lives, but unfortunately, they wanted a confrontation,” he said Wednesday.
The bodies of the seventeen men were taken to the local coroners’ office to be identified. As of Wednesday evening, authorities have still not released the identity of the victims.
Brazilian News Site Folha de São Paulo reported that locals at the scene said that the engagement was one-sided with police gunning down the criminals. The locals went on to identify one of the victims as Ueliton do Nascimento da Silva Junior, a 14-year-old resident of the area who was not involved in drug trafficking. The locals told Folha that the remainder were not from the community.
Police took the seventeen criminals to the hospital. Still, according to the State’s Health Secretary, all arrived without any sign of life. Generally, according to Brazilian law, when police kill, they are required to maintain the body at the scene to allow for proper forensic investigations to take place.
The state’s public security secretary Louismar Fontes said that the reason why the shootout was so one-sided was due to the superior training of the police. Fontes said that police followed procedure by moving the victims to the hospital.
In February of this year, a similar scene played out in Rio de Janeiro when authorities shot and killed 15 alleged drug traffickers. In the follow-up investigation, authorities found that police had removed all the victims from the scene, only for them to arrive dead at the hospital. Since the start of the year, the number of fatal shootings by police has risen when compared with previous years.
Brazil ,and more specifically Amazonas, have been thrown into an ongoing drug cartel war for territory with branches of the major criminal factions escalating violence to establish themselves. Brazil’s border areas have become particularly important, as the cartels use the porous frontier to supply themselves with drugs and weapons.
Amazonas’ public secretary said that they would be investigating the circumstances of Wednesday’s shooting.