Brazil: Lula da Silva Tourism Minister’s links with paramilitaries

The new Minister of Tourism of Brazil, Daniela Carneiro, campaigned in 2018 with Juracy Alves Prudêncio, a paramilitary sentenced to 22 years for homicide, who at that time had a prison permit to work in the government of the municipality of Belford Roxo, whose mayor, Walter dos Santos Carneiro, is her husband.

Carneiro, who took office from her at the head of Tourism this Monday, belongs to the União Brasil party, one of the formations that supported Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

As the newspaper ‘O Globo’ has shown, the person in charge of Tourism appears in several photographs campaigning and in other acts together with Prudêncio, a former sergeant of the Military Police who at the same time had led a paramilitary group responsible for a series of of homicides in the Baixada Fluminense region of Rio de Janeiro.

Prudêncio has been in prison since 2009 for the murder in May 2007 of a 16-year-old boy in a bar and after an operation by the Brazilian authorities that put nine other Military Police agents behind bars who were also members of the militia he led, known as ‘Bonde do Jura.’

In 2020, a journalistic investigation by the newspaper ‘Extra’ revealed that Prudêncio obtained a position in the security department of the Belford Roxo Mayor’s Office, governed by Carneiro’s husband in 2017, which allowed him to get out of prison. However, and despite not going to his job, the hours worked were attributed to him.

In 2008, a year before being arrested and sentenced, he was a candidate for councilor in Nova Iguaçu for the Progressive Republican Party. Although he did not succeed, the investigations against him indicated that he used the militia that he led to intimidate the local population and campaign.

With information from La Gaceta de la Iberosfera