Brazil & Southern Cone - November 2020

In a sign that Brazil’s police may be adopting a new strategy against the country’s largest criminal organisation, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), recent raids have targeted the gang’s financial and money laundering operations. This shift follows years of militarised ‘blitz’ assaults on favelas, a method widely perceived to have had little impact on the criminal operations of drug trafficking organisations (DTOs), while entailing a high civilian death toll. 

On 31 August, the federal police (PF) launched simultaneous raids in 87 cities across Brazil, as almost 1,100 police officers served 422 arrest warrants for PCC gang members. Seventeen days later, police raided properties in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Minas Gerais, with arrest warrants for 28 members of Brazil’s second largest criminal organisation, the Comando Vermelho (CV). Whilst police raids against these DTOs are hardly new, these operations indicate that the police’s emphasis may have shifted from seizing illegal goods and arresting or killing low-level gang members, to targeting the gangs’ financial life-support systems.

According to the police report, the raids against the PCC resulted in the seizure of R$252m (US$45m) worth of assets and targeted the gang’s money launderers. Based on intelligence that funds were being channeled to imprisoned PCC leaders via a network of third parties with no known affiliation to the PCC, the raids may have severed a vital link in the revenue stream of a DTO that is often managed from within Brazil’s prisons. Another operation on 30 September dismantled an “important and sophisticated financial branch” of the PCC’s criminal empire, which had been in operation for over a decade, according to a police statement. Over 70 businesses were closed down for alleged money laundering, and bank accounts containing over R$730m were frozen.

The police’s new focus on hitting DTOs in the wallet was confirmed by Elvis Secco, coordinator general of the PF’s unit against drugs, weapons, and criminal gangs. Discussing the PCC raids in a 4 September interview with weekly news magazine Veja, Secco said “our objective now is asset seizures, stamping out money laundering, and identifying [the gang’s] leadership.” Secco elaborated further in a 2 October interview with news site UOL, in which he likened the new strategy to the Lava Jato (‘Car Wash’) anti-corruption investigations. “If you first identify the financial structure, wealth, properties, you can analyse all of these documents, and from there you can identify the next steps to be taken, as was the case with Lava Jato,” he said.

This represents a marked change from the militarised response of recent years, in which the military police would descend on favelas for hours-long shootouts with gang members, before withdrawing, at which point the DTOs would quickly restore their control over the area. This tactic of sporadic, violent raids carries a high death toll – in the first six months of 2020, São Paulo state’s military and civil police killed 514 people, the highest six-month figure since records began in 2001 – but has done little to truly challenge the PCC’s criminal dominance. 

Doubts remain as to whether the seized assets and dismantled money laundering operations will severely weaken a gang with a presence in over 17 countries (see sidebar) and estimated annual income of up to R$800m. Yet these recent operations do represent a major blow to the PCC, following the arrest of top-level trafficker and PCC ally Gilberto ‘Fuminho’ Aparecido dos Santos in Mozambique in April [SSR-20-05]. It now remains to be seen whether the PCC’s decentralised structure is flexible enough to absorb these setbacks.

• International presence

Documents from the Brazilian intelligence services state that PCC members have been identified in 16 countries outside of Brazil, according to UOL, confirming the group’s international reach. The largest number of identified PCC members was found in Venezuela (163), followed by Uruguay (72), Portugal (43), Guyana (35), Argentina (17), Spain (16), Suriname (14), the US (8), Colombia (6), France (3), Italy (2), Holland (1), Switzerland (1), and the United Kingdom (1). The DTO is also known to have an important presence in Paraguay, and to a lesser extent in Bolivia.

‘André do Rap’

Efforts to weaken the PCC were delivered a blow in early October, following a ruling by a supreme court (STF) justice which granted habeas corpus to André ‘André do Rap’ de Oliveira Macedo, a suspected leader of the PCC who faces convictions for international drug trafficking (which he is appealing), and is understood to manage the DTO’s cocaine trafficking operations to Europe with the ‘Ndrangheta mafia. The ruling sparked debate in judicial sectors [WR-20-41], and the STF plenary has since ruled that Macedo’s preventative prison sentence still holds, but the trafficker had already fled. He is believed to be in Bolivia or Paraguay, with police saying it will be hard to re-capture him.