Antonio da Costa Santos

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antonio da Costa Santos (also known as Toninho) was a Brazilian architect and politician affiliated to the Workers' Party (PT).

Having been surprisingly elected Mayor of Campinas (Toninho was well behind in some vote intention polls), he took office as Mayor of Campinas on January 1, 2001, and was shot to death (two bullets shattered his car's windows and the last hit him on his left shoulder) on the night of September 10, 2001, as he was driving home alone from a shopping mall. His murder, which stunned the country and particularly Campinas (the third larger city in the state of São Paulo, with over 1,000,000 inhabitants), was still unsolved as of 2006.

Initial clues that the murder was of political nature increased recently, as witnesses stated that Toninho, in order to rebalance the city's budget, was keen to reduce overrated values in contracts with urban cleaning companies; some of those were naturally displeased by such decision, and their leaders would attempt against Toninho's life. The Mayor received death threats, but said he was not going to be intimitated by such calls.

Not even the hypothesis of traffic congestion was ignored: it was somewhen said that Toninho was driving too slowly at the night he was shot. A famous and prosecuted drug dealer, nicknamed Andinho, was said to be driving right behind Toninho and, annoyed by his pace, sacked his pistol.

Toninho was succeeded in office by the vice-Mayor, Izalene Tiene. In the very same day of his death, while holding a speech at the Palácio dos Jequitibás, where the Campinas Mayor's office is held, he had a premonition that he would die soon, expressing that Izalene would soon succeed him. He left a 15-year-old daughter and a widow, named Roseana. She recently stated angrily against President Lula's lack of care with her husband's murder investigations, as Lula promised the case to be soonly solved when he took office – what hasn't yet been accomplished.