Organized crime in Brazil has changed—and expanded—considerably in recent years, with new midsize criminal groups emerging in northern states and the country’s most powerful faction—the First Capital Command, known by its Portuguese acronym PCC—expanding its global reach. Despite being imprisoned, these groups’ leaders are the most powerful criminals in Brazil, and the country’s prisons have become one of their most important nodes of power.

From its prison base, the PCC has expanded aggressively to directly control the drug trafficking route from Bolivian coca-growing areas and, through Paraguay and Brazil, to export markets in West Africa and Europe via the port of Santos near São Paulo. Control of this coveted route has provoked a bloody war with the Rio de Janeiro-based Red Command and helped spur regional criminal groups to try to counter the PCC’s growing hegemony.

Deadly rivalries are commonplace in Latin America’s brutal criminal underworld. But this time the stakes involve a fight for outright hegemony in one of the world’s most important cocaine trafficking routes. Regional criminal organizations that had been largely marginal to cocaine trafficking suddenly gained outsized importance as potential allies for trafficking groups looking to thwart the PCC’s bid for dominance.


The consequences of this dynamic have been felt throughout the country, as clashes over contested and highly profitable routes, such as the so-called Solimões Route through the Amazon River, have “caused conflicts and large prison massacres,” according to Marcio Christino, a criminal prosecutor from São Paulo with years of experience investigating organized crime. Whereas well-armed, highly organized criminal groups were once nearly exclusive to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states, the Bolsonaro administration now faces upstart groups in the impoverished north, such as the Northern Family in Amazonas, the Crime Syndicate (formed by PCC defectors) in Rio Grande do Norte, and the Guardians of the State in Ceará.

Many of these groups have displayed a startling propensity for violence and mass disruption with little or no advanced warning. That’s how they demand concessions from local and regional governments, such as unfettered communication with imprisoned leaders, and pressure authorities to keep important leaders in the command structure away from maximum security facilities.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/08...RAB&usg=AOvVaw2IAwEPNtwgB3_6mLzcN1j-