At least 33 inmates killed in new Brazil prison unrest

Roraima: Brazil was hit Friday by its second explosion of grisly prison violence this week, as inmates beheaded and mutilated their rivals at a northern jail, leaving at least 33 dead.

Pictures taken by a police officer at the scene showed bloodied, mangled bodies piled in a concrete hallway at the Monte Cristo Farm Penitentiary (PAMC) in Roraima state.

Many of the victims were beheaded, disemboweled or dismembered, said officials.

The state government said the situation was now "under control."

The latest unrest came days after jailed gang members killed 56 rivals in a 17-hour bloodbath Sunday and Monday at a prison in Manaus, the capital of the neighboring state of Amazonas.

Unlike that incident, Friday`s violence did not appear to be an all-out riot but rather a rapid early morning attack by one group of inmates against another, lasting less than an hour, a local government spokeswoman told AFP.

Most of the killings were carried out with knives, she said. No firearms have been found inside the prison so far.

It is the latest eruption of violence inside Brazil`s overcrowded and underfunded jails.

President Michel Temer is facing growing pressure on the issue.

On Thursday, he announced the federal government would spend $250 million to build at least one new prison in each of Brazil`s 26 states.

Rights activists have long condemned prison conditions in Brazil, where the justice ministry says 50 percent more capacity is needed to handle an inmate population swollen by efforts to crack down on a violent and lucrative drug trade.

PAMC, the largest prison in the state, was also hit by deadly violence in October, when fighting between rival gangs killed 10 inmates.

Some of them were decapitated, others were burned alive.

At the time, the prison held 1,400 inmates -- double its capacity.

The prison holds inmates from the Red Command, a powerful drug gang based in Rio de Janeiro that is allied with a local gang called the Family of the North.

The Family of the North is the group authorities say was responsible for the riot in Manaus. Most of the victims there were members of a rival gang, the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command.Deadly prison riots have intensified since the First Capital Command and the Red Command, Brazil`s biggest gangs, ended a truce last July.

The states of northern Brazil, which border top cocaine producers Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, are battle zones in the drug trade.

Prisons there -- and throughout Brazil -- are often under the de facto control of drug gangs, whose turf wars on the outside are also fought out among inmates.

Overcrowding exacerbates the problem, activists say.

Brazil`s jails hold 622,000 inmates, mostly young black men, according to a 2014 justice ministry report.

It is the world`s fourth-largest prison population after the United States, China and Russia, according to the report.

But proposed solutions such as Temer`s prison-building plan fail to address the root problem, said sociologist Camila Nunes of the Federal University of ABC in Sao Paulo.

Brazil needs "medium- and long-term policies to reduce the vulnerability of certain social groups, to prioritize prevention rather than repression," she told AFP Thursday, after the president`s announcement.

"Supposedly instant solutions like the one that was announced... will not solve the problem. They will just placate public opinion until there`s another tragedy."