BELÉM, BRAZIL—The masked gunmen pulled up to Wanda’s Bar at 3:49 p.m. on May 19 and began firing the moment they left their vehicles. Two people, including Wanda herself, died on the patio.

Inside, the gunmen worked in silence: two in front, shooting unarmed patrons at the bar and in the main room, while a third followed behind with a gun in each hand, firing a single shot into the head of anyone still moving.

When the massacre ended, 11 people lay dead. Only two people survived.

Once again, masked gunmen had struck in the Brazilian city of Belém, as they have for nearly a decade, stalking the streets in open defiance of the law — robbing, extorting and killing without compunction.

Yet they did not belong to one of the many gangs that traffic drugs or guns in Brazil.

They were cops.

The killings drew national attention to police militias that have long plagued Belém, a dilapidated port city on the Amazon River. Part death squad, part criminal enterprise, their ranks are filled with retired and off-duty police officers who kill at will, often with total impunity.

In fact, the slaughter at Wanda’s Bar was not unique because off-duty police officers gunned down civilians without cause. What made this case stand out was the government’s response: It decided to prosecute.

Of the seven people charged with the crime, four were off-duty police officers — including the three suspected gunmen.

“We’ve discovered a cancer inside the police,” said Armando Brasil, one of the prosecutors. “Now we are seeing just how far it has spread.”

The militias operate in the shadows of a severe crackdown on crime by the Brazilian government, which has openly declared war on the gangs, thieves and drug dealers afflicting the nation. Killings by police have soared in recent years, as a force long known for its deadliness has managed to outdo itself.

The number of people officially killed by police reached a five-year high last year, rising to 6,220 — an average of 17 people each day, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, which compiles government data.

The deaths have stirred a familiar debate in Brazil. Human rights advocates denounce the heavy-handed approach as both inhumane and ineffective, while proponents said it is the only way to confront a crime wave that has put the entire nation at risk.

But even police officers acknowledge that the official statistics are only part of the picture.

There is a parallel form of police violence, masked from the public and carried out by illegal militias that draw their ranks from officers with little patience or respect for due process, according to interviews with militia members here in Belém.

By their own admission, groups of off-duty and retired officers regularly commit extrajudicial killings, targeting people they consider criminals, robbers and cop killers without so much as an arrest warrant.

In their telling, militia members are delivering a public service, eliminating threats to society.

“I’ve killed more than 80 criminals in my time as a police officer,” said another militia leader. “I’m a hero to my people. They love me.”

Latin America is in the midst of a homicide crisis. More killings take place in the region’s five most violent nations than in every major war zone combined, according to the Igarapé Institute, which tracks violence worldwide.

The usual suspects are often to blame: the cartels and gangs; the surfeit of guns, frequently from the United States; the paralyzed legal systems.

But violence by the state is another important factor in the bloodshed — driven by an abiding belief that nations must fight force with ruthless force to find peace.

In many dangerous places, even when gangs and organized crime are very well armed, it is not surprising that criminals die in greater numbers than the police or military they are fighting, researchers said.

But when that ratio is highly skewed — and 10 or more suspected criminals die for every police officer or soldier killed — researchers often view that as a clear indication of excessive force by authorities.

In El Salvador, the ratio is staggering — almost 102-to-1 — according to the Lethal Force Monitor, a research group. In other words, for every policeman killed in El Salvador, nearly 102 suspected criminals die — 10 times the level researchers consider suspiciously high.

In Brazil, the number is also striking: 57 suspected criminals die for every police officer killed, analysts found.

But extrajudicial killings are often much more than an extreme step by overzealous officers in cities like Belém and Rio de Janeiro, and some militia members are candid about their criminal motivations.

To line their pockets, some militia members said they bill businesses for security services, taking in hefty sums with mafia-style promises to keep the peace.

The militias also extort criminals and kill those who don’t pay, operations that hardly differ from the ones they are supposedly confronting.

Today in Belém, there are hundreds of militia members operating in more than a dozen different factions, often with help from on-duty police officers, according to officials and militia members themselves. And until recently, officials said, the government rarely prosecuted or investigated them aggressively.

The government of Pará State, where Belém is the capital, said most police officers “do not deviate from their duties” but acknowledges that others do. It said it has arrested about 50 officers this year.

The prosecutor investigating the massacre at Wanda’s Bar, Brasil, has linked the militias to at least 100 murders in the state in the last three years, but he thinks the actual number is much higher.

‘I felt like an instrument of justice’

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He took his first life in 2010, a few years out of the police academy, after a gang called the Red Command killed his colleague.

He and other officers shed their uniforms, put on masks and killed a dozen people they deemed responsible, he said.

After that, every time an officer was killed, he said, he and his fellow officers killed at least 10 suspected gang members in response.

Residents took notice, he said, and in 2012 a father in his neighbourhood asked for help. A man had raped his daughter and was still walking free.

He asked if the officer would kill the man to end his family’s nightmare. When it was done and the suspect was dead, the officer said, the father wept with gratitude and offered money.

He refused at first, then accepted it.

“It was the first time I felt like a hero,” said the officer. “I felt like an instrument of justice.”

From there, it was a short jump to becoming a contract killer, the officer said. Each step away from the law grew easier.

By 2014, the officer said, he was robbing drug dealers, kidnapping and torturing them when they resisted. His hatred of criminals justified just about anything, even killing innocent civilians accidentally. He said he came to embody the thing he hated most.

By that time, he said, militias were operating all over Belém. Some were strictly about killing known criminals. Others were about making money.

Officially, police here in Pará State killed 626 people last year — a dozen each week.

That’s more than 150 times the number of deadly police shootings in all of New York City last year, even though they are roughly the same size.

In Belém, the state capital, people killed by police are disproportionately poor people of colour, as they are elsewhere in Brazil. Nationwide, researchers said, 75 per cent of people shot and killed by police are Black.

Arrests began days after the massacre at Wanda’s Bar. Authorities arrested four police officers — two hailed from the elite ROTAM force — and three others suspected in the crime.

Tying the murders to police was relatively straightforward. Forensic analysts found numerous .40-calibre shells at the scene, a bullet available only to military police, a prosecutor said.

In the meantime, the bar is closed, and residents remain terrified. Some of the accused lived nearby — and their friends still do.

The fear is so palpable that not a single family member of the deceased agreed to be interviewed. Some have moved, others changed phones, and those still around refused to answer their doors or respond to messages.

But a close family friend of the bar’s owner, Maria Ivanilza Pinheiro Monteiro — known widely as Wanda — contended that everyone in the bar was innocent. They were all friends, partying, and the bar itself was a haunt for lots of militia guys, he said on the condition of anonymity for fear for his life.

That’s why a motive is elusive, he said. They all knew the militias or were even friends with them. Some of the people killed in the attack actually supported what the militias did, thinking it was the only way to clean up the community.

In fact, the friend still felt that way.

“They make life easier for the good people,” he said. “Overall, I still think they are a force for good.”

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