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CKnown for its clothing trade, the Brás region, in the center of São Paulo, was under the control of an armed militia that divided the neighborhood’s streets and began extorting street vendors and traders with threats and attacks. The details of how this group acted, with the participation of military police officers, are in the complaint offered by the São Paulo Public Ministry based on the Operation Aurora investigation.
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Prosecutors from the Special Action Group to Combat Organized Crime (Gaeco), an arm of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, reported 16 people to court for three crimes – formation of a private militia, extortion and money laundering. The list includes military police officers, some in office and others retired, a Civil Police clerk and even a loan shark.
The investigation was opened after a group of ten victims asked for help from the Independent Camelôs Union of São Paulo to report extortion on Rua Henrique Dias, one of the streets of Feira da Madrugada.
Payments were collected as a “glove”, in exchange for authorization for traders to settle in the region, and also on a weekly basis. Witnesses reported that traders who did not pay the amount charged were threatened with death, attacked and removed from sales outlets.
Investigators circulated undercover in Brás for weeks, with a spy camera, to collect evidence. Several charges were detected during monitoring actions, both in the boxes and in stalls on the street. It is not known exactly when the scheme began, but the Public Prosecutor’s Office is certain that it was in operation.
“The accused, organized in militia activity, exercised territorial control of the place, dividing among the militia members specific control of certain streets, where they could carry out their acts of extortion, controlling the fixing of electricity points, fixing of lighting and exercising strict control over the permitted size of merchants’ stalls”, says an excerpt from the complaint.
The Brás region has a high level of informality. According to the MP, as they do not have access to credit lines, local merchants borrowed money from loan sharks at abusive interest rates to pay the militiamen and, often, the police officers who were part of the scheme were hired to make the collections.
“Taking advantage of the special vulnerability of the victims, informal traders, mostly from low-income countries, without access to formal credit, part of the militia members also began to operate in the usury market, offering loans to the victims so that they could pay for the extortion amounts, in a vicious cycle that only drained resources from victims and increasingly imprisoned those accused”, states the Public Ministry.
See the list of those reported:
Michele Dantas da Costa Batista;
Luzia Constantino Stefani;
Viviane Leticia Felix Trevisan;
Maurício Oliveira de Souza;
William Perdomo Zanabria Pichamba;
Peterson Ribeiro Batista;
Kelen Fernanda Cardoso;
Fernando Bondade de Oliveira;
Ronei Rodrigues da Cruz;
Luciano Santos da Silva;
Francisco José da Silva Neto;
Miriam Esther Hernandez Rodriguez;
Paloma Joana Bueno;
João Paulo Schmid;
Antônio Marcos Alves de Castro;
Sergio Ferreira do Nascimento.
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