In one murder after another, the Canal Livre crime TV show had an uncanny knack for being first on the scene, gathering graphic footage of the victim.
Too uncanny, say police who are investigating the show’s host, state legislator Wallace Souza, on suspicion of commissioning at least five of the murders to boost his ratings and prove his claim that Brazil’s Amazon region is awash in violent crime. Police have also accused Souza of drug trafficking.
“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos said.
The killings of competing drug traffickers, he said, “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.”
Souza denied all the criminal allegations and called them absurd, insisting that he and his son were being set up by political enemies and drug dealers sick of his two decades of relentless crime coverage on TV and crusading legislative probes.
“I was the one who organized legislative inquiries into organized crime, the prison system, corruption, drug trafficking by police and pedophilia,” Souza said in an interview.
Souza’s lawyer, Francisco Balieiro, said that the only witness is a disgraced police officer hoping for leniency in nine murders he is charged with.
“There is not one piece of material proof in these accusations,” Balieiro said.
Vasconcelos said the accusations, which have made headlines in Brazil, stem from the testimony of several former employees and security guards who worked with the Souzas, allegedly as part of a gang of former police officers involved in drug trafficking.
Souza’s son Rafael has been jailed on charges of homicide, drug trafficking and illegal gun possession.
Police said Wallace Souza faces charges of drug trafficking, gang formation and weapons possession, but has not been charged with any killings.
Souza remains free because of legislative immunity that prevents him from being arrested as long as he is a lawmaker. He is being investigated by a special task force and state judicial authorities will decide whether the case goes forward.
Vasconcelos said the crimes appear to have served the Souzas in two ways: They eliminated drug-trafficking rivals and boosted ratings.
“We believe that they organized a kind of death squad to execute rivals who disputed with them the drug trafficking business,” he said.
Souza “would eliminate his rival and use the killing as a news story for his program,” he said.
Souza became a media personality after a career as a police officer that ended in disgrace, Vasconcelos said, adding that the lawmaker was fired for involvement in fuel theft and pension fraud.
Souza denied those allegations, but said he was forced to leave the force in 1987 after being wrongly accused of involvement in a college entrance exam fraud scheme that he was investigating.
He started Canal Livre two years later on a local commercial station in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s largely lawless Amazonas state. It became extremely popular among Manaus’ 1.7 million residents before going off the air late last year as police intensified their investigation.
The show featured Souza, in a studio, railing against rampant crime in the state, punctuated with often exclusive footage of arrests, crime scenes and drug seizures.
“When I became a police officer in 1979, bandits weren’t raised in this city — no way,” he told the audience in one show.
Brazil was a dictatorship then, whose police ruthlessly targeted criminals with little concern for civil rights.
Souza denied any role in the killings on his show and explained how his reporters managed to get to crime scenes so quickly: well-placed sources and monitoring scanners for police radio dispatches. The show also posted workers at police stations and at the Manaus morgue.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS