Investigation and Analysis of Organized Crime

InSight Crime

Brazil

Brazil Profile

Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, has seen some important security advances in recent years, taking dozens of communities in Rio de Janeiro from criminal gangs through its innovative UPP security program. However, it faces a serious threat from its two largest domestic criminal gangs, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando Capital - PCC) and Red Command (Comando Vermelho), who are becoming increasingly involved in the international drug trade, as well as operating extortion and kidnapping rings at home. Militia groups composed mostly of police are another source of violent crime, extorting entire neighborhoods and carrying out extrajudicial killings. The country is becoming increasingly important as a market and transit point for cocaine. Read more

News

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InSight Crime’s 2018 Homicide Round-Up

A worsening crisis in Venezuela, dark days in Nicaragua, an ever more fragile...

Groups

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Red Command

The Red Command (Comando Vermelho) is Brazil’s oldest criminal group, created...

Personalities

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Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, alias ‘Marcola’

Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known by the aliases “Marcola” and...

Groups

Red Command

The Red Command (Comando Vermelho) is Brazil’s oldest criminal group, created in a Rio de Janeiro prison in the 1970s as a self-protection group for prisoners. It started out with low-level crime like muggings and bank robbery, but in the 1980s the group moved into the cocaine trade, working with Colombian drug cartels and taking on a social leadership role in many of Rio’s favelas.

First Capital Command – PCC

The First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital - PCC) was inspired by the Red Command (Comando Vermelho). Both criminal organizations were formed by prisoners as self-protection groups in Brazil’s brutal prison system. The PCC arose in São Paulo in the 1990s, and has fought a bloody ongoing feud with police in the city. The group, now the largest and best-organized criminal organization in Brazil, is believed to have members in two-thirds of the country's states, and controls drug trafficking routes between Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay.