`Latin Lady Macbeth' Controls Brazil's Outback With Iron Hand

MACEIO, Brazil - The woman Brazilians call the "Latin Lady Macbeth" owns 150 pairs of shoes and 300 designer dresses and likes to carry a sleek Colt .45 in her black Chanel purse.

Denilma Villar de Bulhoes Barros says she has never actually shot anyone, but likes to have the handgun around to show her political enemies who's in charge.

"A woman has to have some sort of protection," she says coyly, cuddling the two poodles she calls Liz Taylor and Richard Burton on the top floor of the white-washed Palace of the Martyrs in this sleepy coastal city.

In the impoverished, rough-and-tumble state of Alagoas in Brazil's quasi-feudal northeast, the 47-year-old Bulhoes is clearly queen. Although she holds no elected government post, the elegant first lady of Alagoas is one of the most powerful women in Brazil.

In this tropical backwater, home to disgraced ex-President Fernando Collor de Mello and the mafia that turned the Brazilian government into a huge influence-peddling operation, nobody crosses Bulhoes.

When her husband, Geraldo Bulhoes, was campaigning for governor of Alagoas three years ago, she threatened to kill a group of rivals when she caught them defacing his campaign posters.

When her husband, the governor, steps out of line, the weapon of choice is said to be a wet towel.

"Every time a woman works and begins to make a name for herself, she makes enemies. I don't rule the state. I simply have strong opinions," says Bulhoes, who has a 64-percent approval rating in the polls - higher than her husband's - and counts former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Argentine leader Evita Peron as role models.

Despite her studied modesty, Bulhoes is the de facto state governor. She hires and fires civil servants, inspects the local troops, coordinates political strategy and, until recently, controlled the state police force, which is dominated by gangsters and professional hitmen.

The Bulhoes' ascent to power coincided with a brutal wave of violence that culminated two weeks ago in the federal government calling for military intervention in Alagoas, a small agricultural state of 2.5 million people.

Federal prosecutors and local human-rights activists say they have documented proof that the state police force is responsible for 80 percent of all crimes in Alagoas and that more than 25 percent of the 15,000-strong police force free-lance as "pistoleiros," or hitmen, for political party bosses.

There are currently 177 cases pending against 708 police officers, although so far none have been tried.

"Everyone knows that the police are committing the crimes. Here they'll gun you down at midday without hiding behind hoods. There are never any witnesses because everyone is too afraid to speak," says Maceio's socialist mayor, Ronaldo Lessa.

He adds that violence was institutionalized under Collor's tenure as state governor in 1987, but has worsened under the Bulhoes.

Lessa's brother, Ricardo, a former police officer, was shot to death outside his house two years ago, a half-hour after a meeting with Bulhoes. Ricardo Lessa had presented the governor with proof that a professional death squad was operating within the state police force.

Today, Ronaldo Lessa is also a marked man. A political enemy of the Bulhoes and critical of government corruption, he walks around the city in a bulletproof vest, accompanied by three undercover federal police agents.

He says the protection is necessary. In March, a councilman who spoke up against political corruption in the state government was decapitated, castrated and dismembered by hired assassins. And in a scene worthy of "The Godfather," a landowner was machine-gunned in his car last month on Maceio's busiest downtown street in the middle of the day.

Although Alagoas has always had a reputation for violence and corruption, this latest, and many say bloodiest, wave started when Bulhoes forced her husband to appoint one of their political supporters, Col. Nilton Rocha, as head of the police force.

After Rocha's appointment, crime rose 50 percent in Maceio, a city of 650,000 people.

"The crime syndicate operating within the force touches on the very power structure of this state. It's clear that Denilma started to use the military police to further her own political ends," says a local police officer, who didn't want to be named.

Rocha, a stocky, military man described by Veja magazine as "a banana-republic colonel," immediately doubled the force to 15,000 from 7,000 and covered up a series of heinous political crimes, many of them carried out by his fellow police officers.

With Bulhoes' help, he doubled the force's budget, only to skim off most of the money for his own forthcoming federal political campaign, says Maj. Joilson Fernandes de Gouveia, who has written a report on the colonel's irregularities in the force.

According to federal prosecutors, Rocha also sends his adversaries to the psychiatric ward of the local military hospital, where they are pumped full of sedatives to keep them from talking.

"The violence in Alagoas is completely unacceptable," said federal Justice Minister Mauricio Correa, who set up a commission last month to investigate the crimes and recommended military intervention in the police force.

At the insistence of the federal government, Gov. Bulhoes finally fired Rocha, but then promoted him to head the military cabinet at the request of his wife.

Bulhoes, who is running for Congress next year, shrugged off the accusations of corruption and launched into a litany of her good works.

Politicians in Brasilia are punishing Alagoas because it is Collor's home state, she says. "Our political enemies want to make us pay for the Collor scandal. But everything is normal here. There's only minor violence in the state. It's all a defamatory campaign.

"If Alagoas were such a dangerous place, I wouldn't go out alone."

And the next moment, Bulhoes gets up to leave, and as she does she collects her deadly Chanel bag.