Massacres are not big news in São Paulo, Brazil's and South America's largest city, anymore. In the last two months alone the city saw five of them. The latest one this Sunday morning, February 25, when five people were murdered in the Kennedy favela (shantytown) in Mauá, in the Greater São Paulo.
Just the day before, four people, among them a 15-year-old pregnant girl, were executed while talking in a square in Itaim Paulista, in São Paulo's east side.
The victims of massacres in the city have grown to 22 just this year. In Itaim, the youngsters were shot by gunmen from inside two cars. A young man and two girls died before they could get any help.
A 18-year-old boy was taken to Santa Marcelina hospital, but could not be saved. The two couples were chatting in the public square and had no criminal records. In both cases authorities still have no clue who the authors are.
The Sunday killings occurred around 6 am. The bodies of four victims were found in the street and the other one inside a shack, in which, according to authorities, there were a gun and 365 cocaine baggies.
The military police informed that those murdered were a 20-year-old woman, a 64-year-old man and 3 other men in their mid 20s. A resident in the area heard the shots and called the civilian police, which came and then summoned the military police. Authorities believe the slaughter was the result of a dispute between two rival drug gangs.
Authorities have no witnesses of the massacres. Two motorcycles found near the crime scene have been seized by the police who intend to investigate if they were used by the murderers. By Sunday night, none of those murdered had been identified. All the police had discovered was that one of the dead men was a bus driver.
Among this year's massacres in São Paulo, the most serious one occurred on February 2, a Friday, when a group of gunmen killed six youngsters between the ages of 15 and 27 who were sitting on a staircase in Brasilândia, a neighborhood in São Paulo's north side.
In the other two massacres, which happened in January, the number of victims, all youngsters, were four and three. In both occasions no one had criminal records either.
