SAO PAULO, May 31 (UPI) -- Brazilian police have recaptured 67 prison inmates following a massive pre-dawn escape Monday from a facility in the south of Sao Paulo, just one of handful of recent incidents of violence in the nation's prisoners.
Up to 160 men initially escaped, Agencia Estado news agency reported, leaving some 90 prisoners at large in the streets of Brazil's largest city.
The mass break out was instigated by a group of six men armed with machine guns who overpowered prison guards and forced them to open cells containing 188 prisoners.
The gunmen were reportedly attempting to free Ricardo Ferreira who was arrested earlier this month for stealing a car and shooting at police. Ferreira and his six machinegun-toting liberators are still at large, said police officials.
The mass escape in Sao Paulo follows a weekend of upheaval at a Rio prison where inmates took more than two dozen people hostage, killing one guard on Sunday as he tried to flee.
Authorities had engaged in several rounds of negotiations with the prisoners to end the siege. The talks were interrupted on Sunday when the prison guard was killed, only to be restarted on Monday morning.
However by late afternoon Monday, officials said that the hostage crisis at the Benfica penitentiary in northern Rio was winding down.
Prisoners who lead the riots and hostage grabs -- members of the Red Command, Brazil's most notorious gang -- said in a letter to authorities that 35 inmates were dead inside Benfica.
Negotiators said it appears prisoners may be ready to release their captives, though Rio state officials remained cautious in their approach to ending the siege. Over the weekend, security officials considered storming the prison and retaking it from armed prisoners by force, a move that would surely have cost the lives of numerous hostages.
"We need to be cautious (while regaining control of the prison) because there are still hostages inside ... we can't risk the lives of the innocent," said Rio de Janeiro Gov. Rosinha Garotinho.
Military police have completely surrounded the prison in case another wave of violence breaks, said security officials.
While prison violence and escapes are not uncommon in Brazil, there has been a recent rash of large-scale actions by prisoner in recent months. Much of the violence is attributed to gang warfare within the prison walls and extreme overcrowding.
In April, 14 prisoners were killed in an uprising at the Urso Branco (White Bear) prison in Rondonia state, part of an effort by inmates to draw attention to their living conditions.
Inmates took unusually grisly measures to bring attention to their demands, hacking up fellow inmates' bodies and displaying their decapitated heads.
They were granted their request for an expanded facility and a new prison director. The facility houses more than 1,000 people, although it was built to accommodate around 350.
In November 2003, six prisoners were killed while trying to escape a Sao Paulo prisoner via a tunnel linked to sewer lines. In all, 80 inmates fled, with authorities only recapturing around 40 prisoners.
Escape attempts and uprisings are often planned and executed by Brazil's highly organized criminal gangs, which are often orchestrated with help from the outside.
Brazil's Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos said Monday that to avoid future incidents authorities need to "dismantle the gangs living on the inside" to break the cycle of violence in the nation's prisons.
