Violence increased in parts of northern Brazil over the past decade as criminal factions, bolstered by mass incarceration, fought over emerging cocaine trafficking routes in this region, a new report shows.
The report covers the expansion period of various criminal organizations across the country, such as the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) and the Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV), among other criminal dynamics.
The Atlas of Violence 2024 (Atlas da Violência) by the Brazilian Institute for Applied Economic Research (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada – IPEA) and the Brazilian Public Security Forum (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública – FBSP), drew on from data in Brazil from 2012 to 2022.
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Below, InSight Crime presents some of the report’s key takeaways.
Shifting Cocaine Routes Led to Increased Violence
Gangs disputing emerging drug trafficking routes in northern and northeastern Brazil drove homicide rates up in several states, the Atlas found, most notably in Piauí, Amapá, and Roraima.
In Piauí, homicides grew by almost 50%, from 16.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012 to 24.1 in 2022. In Amapá and Roraima, the rise in murders was around 15%.
These states, along with several others in the country’s north and northeast, bore the brunt of a war fought between 2016 and 2018 by some of the country’s most important criminal organizations –the PCC and the CV– and their regional allies for control over drug trafficking routes. Before the conflict, the PCC and the CV had been refrained from fighting one another. That non-aggression pact ended abruptly in October 2016 following a prison massacre in Roraima.
For its part, the Atlas recorded a total of 4,002 homicides in Piauí, Amapá and Roraima combined between 2016 and 2018. The PCC and the CV reinstated their non-aggression pact in 2018, but the three states did not record a relevant drop in the number of homicides in the ensuing three years. Between 2019 and 2021, Piauí, Amapá and Roraima registered 3,948 homicides.
The high number of homicides after the truce between the PCC and the CV reflects the expansion and proliferation of regional factions in the North and Northeast. These groups kept fighting over smaller trafficking routes and for control over municipalities.
“These smaller narcotrafficking conflicts are the elements that currently accentuate the number of homicides in Brazil”, Daniel Cerqueira, the coordinator of the Atlas of Violence, told InSight Crime.
Nonetheless, disputes over drug trafficking routes continue to impact northern Brazil.
In 2022, Amazonas had one of the country’s highest homicide rates, at 42.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. The Solimões and Amazon rivers, which traverse the state, are both used to transport drugs, particularly cocaine, from Peru and Colombia across the country and toward international ports.
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Amazonas state is also home to more than 10 rival criminal groups. The most powerful are the Family of the North (Família do Norte – FDN) and the Cartel of the North (Cartel do Norte), but both the PCC and the CV strengthened their operations in the state over the last decade.
Manaus, the state capital, has a seaport and an airport that have become vital for sending drugs to the southeastern region of the country. The city, which has two million inhabitants, was Brazil’s third-most violent capital in 2022, with a homicide rate of 55.7 per 100,000.
Prohibitionist Drug Policies
Through an analysis of the drug problem in Brazil, the Atlas’ authors draw a direct line from hard-line drug policies to violence.
“Drug prohibition generates high social and economic costs,” they write. “Chief among them is the loss of thousands of human lives due to violence.”
For the authors, among the reasons for this “causal” connection is mass incarceration. Brazil’s strict drug prohibition policies led to widespread arrests, most of whom were small-time drug dealers or in possession of minor quantities of narcotics. The overcrowding that followed aided the growth of criminal organizations, including those at the heart of the violence over the last decade.
“Mass incarceration causes the state to lose control and capacity, so it can no longer enforce the law. The result is that the inmates are not re-socialized after leaving prison,” Cerqueira explained.
The stigma surrounding people who have been in prison also hinders the possibility of their reintegrating into society, so former inmates often feel the need to continue in crime to support themselves financially after getting out of prison, he added.
New inmates, often first-time offenders, may join gangs for self-protection whilst behind bars, or are coerced into becoming members under the threat of violence. As a result, mass incarceration has delivered non-violent inmates into the hands of the PCC and the CV, which have regularly fought behind prison walls and carried out brutal prison massacres.
“There’s a big chance that people arrested for small thefts – a chicken thief, a drug user, a small-time trafficker – will join a gang to avoid being killed, and end up in a lifetime of involvement with that group,” Cerqueira, the coordinator of the Atlas of Violence, told InSight Crime.
Prisons have also become epicenters of criminal activity and safe havens from which criminal groups can strategize and exert social and economic control over thousands of inmates and ex-inmates.
However, things may be changing in Brazil. In a major turn, a week after the Atlas report was published, the nation’s top court decriminalized possession of up to 40 grams of marijuana for personal use, which means that the number of people arrested for personal possession of the drug could drop substantially.
According to the Atlas, over 42,600 fewer people would have been in prison in 2022 if the law had allowed the possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana at the time of their arrest.
PCC Hegemony
In what is also an oft-disputed claim, Cerqueira said the PCC’s criminal dominance in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, contributed to a substantial drop in violence. The Atlas added that security policies increased the accountability of police across the state of São Paulo and also helped to reduce violence in the region.
The report relates the drop in homicides in São Paulo to the near-total control that the PCC has in the state capital, which, with close to 12.5 million people, is one of the largest cities in the world. The state recorded one of the biggest drops in homicide rates in the country between 2012 and 2022.
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Cerqueira, however, said the PCC’s grip on São Paulo is not the only reason for the decrease in murders. He noted a change in local security policy models.
“A drop in the state of São Paulo’s homicide rate began to be recorded in 1999, while the PCC gained strength in the mid-2000s, around 2006,” Cerqueira told InSight Crime. The downward trend in homicides in São Paulo state began before PCC’s monopoly and extended to the period between 2012 and 2022, he explained.
These changes began in the early 2000s in São Paulo, when police poured money into intelligence resources, including the implementation of body cameras used by police officers in 2019. This policy has reportedly reduced killings committed by the police in the state.
Such policing measures have been expanded to other states, Cerqueira said. Goiás and the Distrito Federal, where the country’s capital, Brasilia, is located, began implementing security policies focused on enhancing police intelligence during the period covered by the Atlas report, with projects to analyze criminal links and deterrence-focused initiatives.
For the Atlas, the policies were noteworthy. Together with São Paulo, these two states recorded the biggest drops in homicide rates in the country between 2012 and 2022.
Feature image: Military police occupy the Jacarezinho favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. Credit: AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo