Mafia assassination threat forces Brazil MP into exile

A leading anti-mafia campaigner and MP is preparing to flee Brazil after receiving a barrage of death threats from Rio de Janeiro’s powerful and violent mafia.

Marcelo Freixo, a veteran human rights activist known for his outreach work in Rio’s prisons and favelas, announced on Monday that he was leaving Brazil with the support of Amnesty International. Aides did not say in which country Freixo and his family would seek refuge.

Freixo’s decision came after security authorities received credible reports of a plot to assassinate him. In August, Patricia Acioli, a prominent anti-mafia judge, was shot dead, hit by 21 police-issue bullets.

A former member of Rio-based human rights group Justiça Global, 44-year-old Freixo was elected to Rio’s state parliament in 2006, the same year his brother was assassinated by gunmen.

In 2008 he presided over a parliamentary inquiry into Rio’s mafia: groups of off-duty police officers, prison guards and firemen known here as milicias. The inquiry was set up after two undercover journalists and their driver were kidnapped and tortured by milicia members while preparing an exposé of their activities in one Rio slum.

Freixo’s outspoken stance against Rio’s mafia has led to regular death threats. Since 2008 he has been forced to use a bulletproof car and 24-hour security detail.

“I didn’t do this because I was born to be a hero,” Freixo told the Guardian last year shortly before being re-elected for a second term. “It is my obligation.”

In a 2008 interview, inside his chambers in central Rio, a visibly exhausted Freixo spoke of how the death threats had altered his life.

“Everything has changed. I have to go everywhere with bodyguards. I have a bulletproof car. I go out far less. I have to constantly change my routine. There are parts of Rio I can’t go to anymore,” he complained.

“It’s really bad. You lose your freedom and it becomes tiring. You get tired. But there’s nothing that can be done. Anyone who gets involved in this fight knows that these things are going to happen … I have to do it.”

Freixo spoke at length about the brutal tactics employed by the milicias, now said to control at least 300 areas of Rio. One group’s trademark was executing its enemies with a single rifle shot to the face, he said.

“They are capable of doing something. They have in the past. So I have to take care.”

Freixo, who hopes to run for mayor in 2012, vowed to return home.

“I am leaving the country but this is not a retreat. It does not mean I regret taking on the mafia. I will return and I will keep fighting,” he told Rio newspaper O Globo on the eve of his departure.