SAO PAULO, Brazil — The official death toll from a wave of attacks here rose Tuesday to 133, including 18 inmates whose bodies were found after prison riots were finally quelled.
Calm returned to South America's most populous city, which was paralyzed by scores of attacks that began Friday. But concern grew over the possibility of excessive retribution by law enforcement officials when the number of suspects reported killed by the police almost doubled, from 38 to 71, in one day.
In a nation where the police have often been implicated in assassinations and extrajudicial killings, human rights advocates raised alarms and called for reform of an overcrowded prison system long known as a nest of organized crime abetted by corrupt officials.
The aftermath of the widespread violence -- blamed by authorities on a notorious prison gang ordering strikes from behind bars -- also seemed certain to affect Brazil's hotly contested national elections scheduled for October.
"The mood of terror we have had in the past few days, that civil-war like situation, cannot justify giving the police a license to kill," said Ariel de Castro Alves, coordinator of the National Movement for Human Rights.
Authorities insisted that officers had acted legally to counter the orchestrated attacks on police and fire stations, prisons, banks and other targets that also left at least 40 police officers and prison guards dead.
"We're at war with them, there will be more casualties, but we won't back down," Col. Elizeu Eclair Teixeira Borges, the state military police chief, told reporters.
Local media reported that the violence finally ceased after secret negotiations between the state government and the prison gang orchestrating the mayhem, the First Command of the Capital, known as PCC, its initials in Portuguese.
Authorities publicly denied negotiating with the gang, which, among other initiatives, is reportedly contemplating running candidates in local and national elections this year. But independent experts suggested that such talks were plausible, given the power and reach of the PCC, which has extensive cash holdings from drug and protection rackets.
Meanwhile, critics pointed to the government's slashing of aid for public safety reform in recent years and lack of attention to Brazil's notoriously brutal prisons, where revolts and takeovers are common.
