{"id":20911,"date":"2026-04-26T16:41:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T15:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=20911"},"modified":"2026-04-26T16:41:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T15:41:10","slug":"how-a-brazilian-prison-gang-became-a-global-cocaine-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2026\/04\/how-a-brazilian-prison-gang-became-a-global-cocaine-power\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Brazilian Prison Gang Became a Global Cocaine Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

From:<\/strong> drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com<\/a> <drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com<\/a>> On Behalf Of <\/strong>mlp3@starpower.net – Maggie Petito, who comments:<\/span><\/p>\n

“The PCC and assorted cartels and rackets do now consolidate to enhance profits and control to better help fund their sponsors.\u00a0<\/em>This article, while informative, covers the eastern side and leaves mostly untouched the western side of South America.”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><\/span><\/p>\n

by\u00a0 Samantha Pearson – Wall Street Journal – April 20, 2026<\/span><\/p>\n

From arms dealing in Boston to pirate attacks in the Amazon, the PCC poses one of the greatest risks to international efforts to curb organized crime<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A Brazilian gang, First Capital Command (PCC), is rapidly becoming a major global criminal organization, reshaping cocaine flows to the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n

S\u00c3O PAULO\u2014A Brazilian gang founded in the country\u2019s violent prisons is fast becoming one of the world\u2019s biggest criminal organizations, reshaping global cocaine flows from South America to Europe\u2019s busiest ports and edging into the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n

Long under Washington\u2019s radar, the First Capital Command, known by its Portuguese initials PCC, started out as a disgruntled band of inmates fighting for soap and toilet paper in the 1990s.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It now has some 40,000 members behind bars and on the streets with a vast network of affiliates\u2014making it the largest criminal group in the Americas by some estimates, operating in nearly 30 countries on every continent except Antarctica.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe PCC has become a truly transnational group,\u201d said Lincoln Gakiya, Brazil\u2019s top PCC prosecutor, who has tracked its rise for two decades. \u201cI believe it is now the fastest-growing criminal organization in the world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With the scale of Italian organized criminal groups and the efficiency of a multinational corporation, the PCC has helped drive record cocaine seizures in Europe and sparked violent turf wars in the heart of major ports in Belgium and the Netherlands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Prosecutors and police in Brazil are calling on President Trump to label the PCC a Foreign Terrorist Organization, joining more than a dozen other Latin criminal networks.<\/span><\/p>\n

The PCC is organized crime at its most organized, prosecutors say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike the narco-tycoons of Mexico, the heavily armed Colombian cocaine militias or the flashy drug lords of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Red Command gang, PCC members keep a low, businesslike profile, seeking fortune not fame\u2014and shying away from the kinds of gratuitous violence that attract police and TV news crews. New recruits sign up to a strict internal code of conduct, their swearing-in ceremonies sometimes conducted by videoconference.<\/span><\/p>\n

By adopting religious personas\u2014pretending to be ministers\u2014PCC figures have gone into far-flung regions of Brazil to gain the trust of locals and recruit new members, while securing routes to neighboring cocaine-producing countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many evangelicals here embrace the so-called prosperity gospel\u2014the belief that wealth signals divine favor\u2014helping the gang make inroads in poor communities. In 2023, prosecutors in Brazil\u2019s northern state of Rio Grande do Norte investigated a PCC cell accused of setting up at least seven churches to launder drug money\u2014a practice now so common that authorities have a name for it: narco-Pentecostalism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Drug profits are also laundered through gas stations, fintechs, real-estate funds, sex motels, car dealerships and construction firms, police say. S\u00e3o Paulo authorities launched an operation against a Chinese-run criminal group in February that investigators say worked with PCC associates to launder more than $200 million through the sale of electronics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Few crimes are outside the PCC\u2019s reach. Members today are involved in everything from illegal gold mining and cargo theft to cybercrimes and the trafficking of exotic birds, according to dozens of interviews with state security officials.<\/span><\/p>\n

Coming to America: <\/strong>Cocaine, though, remains the PCC\u2019s core business and that means that the gang has also become America\u2019s problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

In an organization chart that S\u00e3o Paulo authorities have built there\u2019s now a new category\u2014\u201cNorth American division.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the PCC in 2021 and in 2024 froze the U.S. assets of Diego Gon\u00e7alves do Carmo, who laundered some $240 million for the PCC and continues to help run financial operations despite having been jailed in Brazil.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. authorities have since identified individuals affiliated with the PCC in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Tennessee. In Massachusetts, the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office last year announced charges against 18 Brazilians prosecutors say were linked to the PCC for trafficking handguns, rifles and shotguns\u2014and, in one case, fentanyl.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe PCC has forged a bloody path to dominance,\u201d the Treasury Department said in a statement at the time of sanctions against Gon\u00e7alves do Carmo, calling it \u201cone of the most significant narcotics trafficking organizations\u201d in Latin America.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Born in captivity: <\/strong>When the PCC was born in August 1993 inside the grimy walls of the Taubat\u00e9 high-security prison in S\u00e3o Paulo state, its founders weren\u2019t seeking world domination.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They demanded better sanitation and beds, among other basics. Brazil\u2019s prisons were slum-like infernos\u2014some of the world\u2019s most overcrowded and violent, plagued by tuberculosis and lice\u2014and rights groups said guards routinely beat inmates. Resentment was simmering at Taubat\u00e9 after 111 inmates had months earlier been killed when police crushed a rebellion at another prison not far away. Eight prisoners formed a pact of loyalty at Taubat\u00e9, vowing to protect each other against the guards.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What then followed was one of the biggest policy mistakes in Latin American law enforcement history.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alarmed by the growing jailhouse fraternity, authorities tightened prison controls and transferred inmates to other states. This only accelerated the PCC\u2019s national expansion and hardened its resolve. \u201cPeace, justice and freedom\u201d became the PCC\u2019s rallying call, as it cast itself as a parallel power to a state whose abuses\u2014from prison officials to politicians\u2014help the gang draw recruits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the next three decades, the transferred inmates set up new PCC cells in prisons across the country and tightened their grip behind bars, both in Paraguay and Brazil, where thousands of active members remain in jail. The PCC assigns cells, distributes contraband and even produces its own prison rum, \u201cCrazy Maria.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The state has been unable to bring PCC inmates under control. The country\u2019s chronically overcrowded and understaffed prisons struggle to enforce even basic rules such as bans on cellphones, enabling gang leaders to keep running criminal operations from their cells.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Tie brigade\u2019: <\/strong>Inmates are recruited in exchange for legal help from its army of lawyers, known as \u201cthe tie brigade.\u201d Those PCC members who disobey rules are punished through internal jailhouse trials, which can end in torture or execution, authorities say.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the gang\u2019s biggest expansion has been outside the prison walls\u2014as the group set its sights on securing cocaine from the world\u2019s three main producers\u2014Colombia, Peru and Bolivia\u2014at wholesale prices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That has brought the PCC to the world\u2019s biggest rainforest, the Amazon.<\/span><\/p>\n

The PCC is a household name in villages like Urucurituba, 1,600 miles north of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s squalid jails, where the vast milky Madeira River cuts through the rainforest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Like many riverside communities, Urucurituba doesn\u2019t have a resident doctor or even police officer. But it does now have its own drug dealer\u2014several of them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in the hands of the traffickers now,\u201d said Jeffesson Ribeiro, who runs a small hotel by the pier, where drug gangs have started a soccer team to recruit young men.<\/span><\/p>\n

Parallel justice system<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

With no police presence, the traffickers operate a parallel justice system in the village of some 500 families\u2014punishing petty thieves and meting out brutal justice as they see fit, residents said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey used to do things in hiding, now they fear no one,\u201d said a worker at one of the village\u2019s makeshift restaurants. During the night, locals sometimes hear the screams of those being tortured by the gang members, he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The gang\u2019s expansion cut out the middlemen who used to smuggle the drug into Brazil from\u00a0largely remote and unchecked borders.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

PCC figures have battled for control of the Amazon rainforest\u2014whose waterways connect with cocaine-producing countries\u2014with the help of corrupt local authorities and by going so far as to pose as evangelical pastors spreading the word of God, said Marcus Vin\u00edcius Almeida, who just stepped down as public security secretary for Amazonas state.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though churches oppose organized crime and offer themselves as a path out of gangs, the PCC offers recruits a future in a system \u201cmade for the poor by the poor,\u201d said Bruno Manso, a foremost authority on the gang and co-author of \u201cThe War: The Rise of the PCC and the World of Crime in Brazil.\u201d Manso said the PCC provides what recruits feel they can\u2019t get elsewhere: escape from \u201cthe utter misery of urban life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The PCC\u2019s move north hasn\u2019t been easy. It cost it its longstanding truce with Rio\u2019s Red Command gang and its local allies, setting off bloody turf battles across the forest from 2016 to today. To buttress its forces, the PCC has had to recruit renegade guerrillas who didn\u2019t participate in a 2016 peace accord in Colombia, according to state prosecutors,\u00a0gaining seasoned fighters and bomb makers as well as access to military-grade weapons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The efforts have paid off handsomely. Authorities estimate the PCC moves several tons each month though the Amazon, with many small cities and towns in the world\u2019s largest rainforest now under the group\u2019s control.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trucks, river barges, light aircraft and helicopters carry cocaine through the dense jungle to the Atlantic coast, where it is smuggled aboard containerships to transit points in West Africa en route to growing markets in Europe, authorities say.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg are among the top destinations, where violence has spilled into the streets as the PCC\u2019s local partners and others battle to carve up the cocaine trade. Grenade attacks, shootings, murders, torture and kidnappings have been documented by port police.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like other large organized crime groups in Latin America, the PCC\u2019s interest doesn\u2019t just lie in drugs. In addition to mining gold, its members have branched into timber extraction, human trafficking, illegal fishing and poaching, and even the enslavement of some indigenous communities, said Almeida.\u00a0 Europe, though, is the region where the PCC has found its most lucrative business opportunities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cocaine seizures in the European Union have now hit record highs for seven straight years, with the most recent figures showing 419 tons seized across member states in 2023, led by major entry hubs such as Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Much of that has sailed out of the Port of Santos just southeast of S\u00e3o Paulo, Latin America\u2019s biggest container port.<\/span><\/p>\n

Divers and welders have been arrested in recent years for hiding cocaine in the hulls of ships bound for Europe and Africa, in some cases packing as much as half a ton of the drug into underwater recessed chambers in the dead of night.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the PCC operates more like a marketplace or regulatory agency rather than a traditional organization\u2014while eschewing a hierarchical structure like some cocaine gangs. \u201cIt became the government of the illegal world,\u201d said Manso, the author who has written extensively on the PCC.\u00a0No member is above the rules in a gang that lives by the importance of \u201cequality\u201d and \u201cunion,\u201d but anyone can prosper as long as they remain loyal, said Manso. Free-market capitalism is a mantra.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to sell drugs to the Netherlands and you have capacity to do so, then you can,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you want to launder money through a gas station, go for it\u2026it\u2019s a \u2018government\u2019 with a liberal mindset that allows everyone to earn money.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That horizontal structure allows the PCC to expand rapidly without territorial control. In recent years it has repurposed port terminals and other logistical infrastructure and forged partnerships with Italy\u2019s \u2019Ndrangheta, Japan\u2019s Yakuza and Albanian and Serbian gangs in West Africa. Gakiya, the prosecutor, calls the alliances \u201ccriminal convergence.\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Without the top-down hierarchy of other drug-trafficking groups, the PCC is harder to decapitate\u2014so much so that it has flourished even though its longtime leader, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as Marcola, has been in jail since 1999.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A former street thief who became an avid reader of Dante, Marcola has ordered killings and helped orchestrate the PCC\u2019s transnational expansion, even marrying and fathering children behind bars. Yet, investigators say the group now doesn\u2019t depend on any single leader.<\/span><\/p>\n

Officials no longer talk about eliminating the PCC but managing its uneasy coexistence with the state\u2014often leaving investigators frustrated or stunned by the links between gangsters and the state itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Police in February arrested the operator of a multimillion-dollar fintech that authorities believe financed electoral campaigns in the 2024 municipal elections to secure garbage-collection contracts, bus concessions and fuel-supply deals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Colonel Pedro Lopes, head of intelligence for S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s military police at the time of the vote, said the PCC\u2019s infiltration of politics across Brazil\u2019s wealthiest state had taken even the most experienced investigators by surprise.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s so much bigger than I thought.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0 www.drugwatch.org<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com <drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of mlp3@starpower.net – Maggie Petito, who comments: “The PCC and assorted cartels and rackets do now consolidate to enhance profits and control to better help fund their sponsors.\u00a0This article, while informative, covers the eastern side and leaves mostly untouched the western side of South America.” >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> by\u00a0 Samantha Pearson – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,32,142,119,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cocaine","category-crime-violence-prison","category-latest-news","category-prevalence","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20911"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20934,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20911\/revisions\/20934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}