inmates in the Desembargador Vidal Pessoa Central Prison of Manaus, Amazonas held a peaceful protest against conditions in es called in military police shock-troops. They reportedly beat the inmates, who had taken refuge in their cells, with batons, as well as hitting and kicking them. Subsequently they locked the inmates in their cells and threw tear gas grenades in after them. For prisoners to complain to officials about their treatment takes enormous courage. In Recife, Pernambuco state, on 11 May 1993, prisoners told a visiting delegation in the Barreto Campelo Prison of the brutality they faced. The prisoners reported incidents of torture and named the alleged torturers, even though they were in the same room. The inmates expressed their fears of reprisals from the prison staff. Some of them told the delegates that the director of the prison had threatened them with severe punishment if they dared to speak out. The torture they described included beatings, near drowning, death threats and electric shocks. In his report on the visit to Recife, one of the delegates, the President of the National Council for Penal and Prison Policy, noted that despite persistent reports in the local press about ill-treatment in prisons in Pernambuco, the Judge of Penal Sentences and the Secretary of Justice for Pernambuco claimed to have no official knowledge of the prisoners' complaints. He asked the state authorities to investigate the prisoners' allegations, but no information has emerged about any investigation. Two incidents involving prisoners with AIDS were reported in S?o Paulo in 1994. On 27 March, a woman prisoner who was in the final stages of AIDS in the Central Hospital of the Penitentiary System, was reportedly beaten by a prison warden. The woman, named Leci Nazareth da Silva, who was in great pain, was calling for the assistance of a nurse when, just after midnight, a warden came to her cell, shouted at her to shut up, and hit her in ...
