Brazil’s new Minister of Tourism, Daniela Carneiro, campaigned in 2018 with Juracy Alves Prudencio, a paramilitary sentenced to 22 years for murder, who at the time had a prison permit to work in the government of the municipality of Belford Roxo, whose mayor, Walter dos Santos Carneiro, is her husband.
Carneiro, who took office as head of Tourism this Monday, belongs to the Union Brazil party, one of the three conservative formations with which the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has had to make do in response to the support received before and after the elections.
As reported by the newspaper ‘O Globo’, the head of Tourism appears in several campaign photographs and in other acts together with Prudencio, a former sergeant of the Military Police who at the same time had led a paramilitary group responsible for a series of homicides in the Baixada Fluminense region of Rio de Janeiro.
Prudencio has been in prison since 2009 for the May 2007 murder of a 16-year-old boy in a bar and following an operation by Brazilian authorities that put nine other Military Police officers behind bars who were also members of the militia he led, known as ‘Bonde do Jura’.
In 2020 a journalistic investigation by the newspaper ‘Extra’ revealed that Prudencio achieved a position in the security department of the Belford Roxo City Hall, governed by Carneiro’s husband of 2017, which allowed him to get out of prison.
However, and despite not attending his job, he was credited for the hours worked. The local government claimed that he never took possession, that he did not receive any salary and that he was voluntarily complying with an administrative file. After the controversy, he did not get any more prison leave.
In 2008, a year before his arrest and conviction, he was a candidate for councilman in Nova Iguaçu for the Progressive Republican Party. Although he was unsuccessful, investigations against him indicated that he used the militia he led to terrorize the local population and campaign.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
