Brazilian Senator Cid Gomes was shot on Wednesday afternoon by Military Police agents protesting in the municipality of Sobral (inside the state of Ceará, northeast of the country).

The circumstances are surreal: the agents were locked up and hooded to hide their identity inside a barracks, protesting asking for salary increases. Tired of seeing how the streets were empty of police, the senator, a native of that city, climbed into an excavator to break the barracks fence and force them to work. Megaphone in hand warned them: "You have five minutes to take your relatives, your wives and children and leave here in peace, five minutes, not one more."

The law does not allow the police to go on strike, so in this type of protest the agents summon their relatives to occupy the doors of the barracks and prevent the exit of vehicles to patrol.

After much insistence, the senator started the excavator, and seconds later the shooting began. The politician was injured in the left chest. Initially it was said that it was a shot of a rubber ball, but later its surroundings confirmed that it was a shot of a firearm. His life is not in danger, since his vital organs were not affected, his brother Ciro Gomes reported on social media. The two belong to the leftist Labor Democratic Party. Ciro was a candidate in the elections that Bolsonaro won, being in third position.

A few minutes after the incident, one of the sons of Brazilian President Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro said that the senator had been foolish by exposing military and family members to unnecessary risk, and Ciro replied: "They will have to kill us before allowing the militias control the state of Ceará as your family's scoundrels did with Rio de Janeiro. " The militias are criminal groups composed mostly of pillages and other agents of the State, and today they control huge regions in the state of Rio.

Gradually the Ceará security crisis is taking on a national dimension. For days there were protests by the police, but they were rising in virulence in the last hours. In the state capital, Fortaleza, three military police officers were arrested by colleagues from the Civil Police after cornering a patrol car and puncturing the tires. In the city of Sobral, hooded agents walked through the center in a car of the Military Police ordering all trade to lower the blinds, a common practice among drug trafficking.

In the face of the prevailing chaos, the central government authorized the sending to Ceará of men of the National Force, a special body created in 2004 formed by police and military firefighters who usually act in crisis situations. "I recommend that the necessary measures be taken so that the paralysis movement ends as soon as possible," said Justice and Public Security Minister Sérgio Moro in a letter to the governor of Ceará, Camilo Santana.

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