As well as being Latin America’s largest country by population, economy, and area, Brazil is also home to some of the region’s most powerful criminal organizations.
The country shares porous borders with every nation in South America except Ecuador and Chile, and its many major ports make it a key hub for global cocaine trafficking. It is also a major drug consumer.
Brazil’s two largest gangs, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) and the Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV), have used prisons as bases of operations, becoming increasingly involved in international drug trafficking as well as arms and contraband trafficking.
Militias, largely comprised of current and former police officers, are another source of violent crime, extorting whole neighborhoods and committing extrajudicial killings.
Geography
Brazil has a 16,000-kilometer land border and an 8,000-kilometer coastline, and its busy ports are used to ship cocaine to Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Brazil’s neighbors include the world’s three main cocaine producers, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as one of the top marijuana producers, Paraguay.
Additionally, Brazil contains most of the Amazon basin, an ecologically critical region that has attracted timber traffickers, unauthorized miners, wildlife smugglers, and drug runners, among other criminals.
History
Brazil’s origins as a colony of the Portuguese, rather than the Spanish, empire lend it a different linguistic and cultural heritage compared to most of its Latin American neighbors. It became an independent country in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.
Brazil saw a massive exodus of rural dwellers towards the main urban centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from the 1950s to 1970s, which led to the growth of informal settlements known as “favelas.” The concentrated inequality and poverty in the favelas, which lacked a clear state presence, made them ideal breeding grounds for organized crime.
In the 1950s, a powerful criminal mafia began to form around jogo do bicho, or the animal game, an illegal gambling racket that became hugely popular. The bosses who ran the game built up large fortunes, laundering their profits through legitimate companies. Eventually, they branched out into contract killing and prostitution rings, buying off police and politicians. The power of the bicheiros, or animal game bosses, peaked in the 1980s, when they began laundering money through Rio de Janeiro’s famous Carnival celebrations.
Meanwhile, organized criminal groups also began to form amid the strong state repression and brutal squalor that characterized the country’s prisons during a period of military rule lasting from 1964 to 1985. Brazil’s two most powerful gangs, the Red Command and the PCC both began in prisons in the early 1970s and the 1990s, respectively, later hitting the streets of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
During the 1970s, links began to emerge among the bicheiros, international drug smuggling networks, and local traffickers. As the global cocaine market boomed in the 1980s, Brazil attracted South America’s most prominent drug producers as a transit point for drugs bound for European and US markets. Colombian groups moved into Brazilian territory, attracted by its location and the availability of precursor chemicals. They began smuggling cocaine into the country in base form and setting up laboratories close to domestic points of sale as well as international ports used to send the drug to markets abroad.
Under the premise of fighting drug gangs, vigilante groups known as militias, made up of current and former members of the police, began to emerge in urban areas. Today, these vigilante groups represent an important criminal threat. They operate their own rackets, including extortion and kidnapping, primarily in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. Some have also moved into the drug trade.
Since the start of the 21st Century, Brazil’s criminal groups have solidified their presence in their traditional strongholds of prisons and favelas, while expanding into the Amazon and neighboring countries – particularly Paraguay. In response, recent national governments have largely followed anti-crime policies focused on heavy-handed police and military operations, and mass incarceration.
Environmental crime surged from 2019 to 2022 during the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, who staunchly opposed environmental protection measures, claiming they hindered economic growth. Bolsonaro’s administration also significantly relaxed gun restrictions, allowing criminals easier access to powerful firearms.
Bolsonaro’s successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had previously served as president from 2003 to 2010, took steps early in his term to reverse those aspects of his predecessor’s legacy. Lula launched hard-hitting military operations against environmental criminals in the Amazon and promised to roll back loosened gun laws. However, his overall anti-crime posture has remained largely traditional.
Criminal Groups
Brazil’s two main prison gangs, the PCC and the Red Command, have long dominated the country’s organized crime landscape.
The PCC was born in the 1990s in the prisons of Latin America’s largest city, São Paulo, and is now firmly established as one of the region’s most powerful criminal actors. The gang has become a transnational threat, moving much of the cocaine flowing from Brazil to Europe and having set up a secondary power base in neighboring Paraguay.
The Red Command was created in the 1970s as a self-protection group for prisoners in Rio de Janeiro, and served as an inspiration for the PCC. The two groups maintained a truce throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, but it broke down in 2016, setting off a violent, nationwide underworld realignment.
The Red Command has used its strong presence in its home turf of Rio de Janeiro to gain major influence in prisons across the country. It also has a foothold inside Bolivia, from where it sources much of its cocaine. However, it faces competition in Rio from two gangs that formed as splinter groups: the Pure Third Command (Terceiro Comando Puro) and Amigos dos Amigos.
The Family of the North (Familia do Norte – FDN) has long been Brazil’s third-largest criminal group, with a strong presence in northern Brazil but not matching the nationwide presence of the PCC and Red Command. In early 2020, the FDN came under sustained attack by the Red Command in Manaus, the biggest city in the Amazon. While the fallout of this war has not been fully measured, it is likely the FDN has been left greatly weakened.
Bullet in the Face (Bala na Cara – BNC)is a prominent criminal group headquartered in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, with a presence in southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina.
Escritório do Crime and the Justice League (Liga da Justiça) are among the largest and most powerful militia groups in Rio de Janeiro, controlling many aspects of life in western parts of the city. Their criminal portfolio extends to drug trafficking, extortion and other organized crime activities. In the last couple of years, these militia groups have begun setting aside their traditional rivalries with the Red Command and morphing into hybrid criminal structures.
Brazil also is home to sophisticated corruption networks, many of which have organized around politics and the construction industry.
Additionally, foreign crime groups – primarily Nigerian networks and the Italian ‘Ndrangheta — have a presence in Brazil.
Security Forces
Brazil’s military is the largest in Latin America. Its primary role is enforcing border control, but the country’s large size, combined with the remoteness of its border regions and a lack of capacity on the part of neighboring nations, makes this difficult.
Brazilian police are divided into federal and state forces, which include military and civilian forces. The Federal Police are responsible for investigating international and state crimes. The Military Police are responsible for enforcing public order within the states. The Civilian Police manages criminal investigations on the state level. The Federal Highway Police have also begun to take on crime-fighting functions.
Brazilian police forces have a reputation for abusiveness, lack of accountability, and low levels of public trust. They frequently face accusations of extrajudicial killings, and innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire of shootouts between security forces and criminals.
Corruption also poses a challenge for many Brazilian security institutions. Police and soldiers often work with organized crime groups, or form their own criminal organizations, as in the case of the militias.
Judicial System
Brazil’s judicial system has federal and state courts, as well as courts specialized in military, labor-related, and electoral matters. The country’s highest court is the Supreme Federal Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal).
Most courts are slow, corrupt, and generally ineffective. Pretrial detention is common for criminal suspects, contributing to problems in the prison system.
Prisons
Brazil has one of the world’s largest prison populations, divided into federal and state systems. The facilities are often overcrowded, under-resourced, and controlled by one or more gangs. They are frequently the scene of prisoner abuse and bloody battles between criminal groups, which use them as bases of operations.