[Warning This video contains graphic content]
This is Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho,
better known as Marcola.
He's one of the most powerful prisoners in the world.
For nearly two decades,
Marcola has led Brazil’s most ruthless and notorious gang,
the PCC.
The PCC is responsible for some of the most violent terror attacks
that Brazil has ever seen.
Based in São Paulo and with over 30,000 members,
this violent organization have massacred police,
murdered judges,
and shut down entire cities.
They control 60 percent of Brazil’s cocaine market
and are responsible for the biggest bank robberies
in the country’s history.
The PCC is the strongest, most sophisticated,
most dangerous criminal organization you haven’t heard of.
[Dogs of War]
This episode is about the PCC
and the gang’s violent expansion across South America.
Through brute force,
political influence, and financial control,
the PCC have redefined what a gang is.
If we simply look at the PCC as a criminal organization,
as an enemy of the state,
or as a violent organization capable of committing violence,
we’re really missing half the story.
The PCC is a governing institution.
The PCC is no ordinary gang.
Thousands of their members are currently in prison.
This includes Marcola himself,
who is serving a 232-year sentence.
There’s thousands and thousands of low-level members in prisons.
There’s these millionaire drug traffickers
who are flying around the world.
There’s this brilliant genius figure of Marcola.
Marcola has turned the entire Brazilian prison system
into a mass recruitment program for the PCC.
To understand how he did this,
you need to understand a bit about Brazil.
When it comes to crime,
Brazil uses a mass incarceration strategy.
If you get caught, you’re going behind bars.
The state turns to mass incarceration
as its way of dealing with those problems,
and in so doing, locks up these youths
and gives them incentives to obey the prison gang.
Because all throughout the urban periphery
are youth who are willing to throw Molotov cocktails,
willing to burn buses
because they’ve received an order from prison to do so.
Why? Because they anticipate going to prison.
We live in a corrupt country.
We are treated like scum,
but above us, there are many big names
who steal more than we do
and enable trafficking above our heads.
Drug trafficking runs the nation’s finances,
and there is no way they’ll stop it.
For decades, hundreds of thousands of prisoners
languished in overcrowded prisons.
There, they were subject to brutal treatment by state security
and each other.
Then the PCC came along.
It learned to govern the prison system
and to bring order to the prison system,
to a prison system that was incredibly violent.
There was violence among prisoners.
There was exploitation of prisoners by one another.
There was prison rape and prison theft and murders.
And the PCC and other prison gangs learned to bring order.
The gang organized themselves like a trade union
and charged prisoners a monthly fee.
They paid for lawyers, family visits
and even provided classes on how to blow up cash machines.
Most importantly, though, they offered protection.
What started as a radical anti-oppression group
has transformed into a gang
that act more like a multinational corporation.
But the PCC has personnel files on all 35,000 members,
and it’s got Excel spreadsheets for all of its financial dealings.
It’s got all these internal rules and regulations.
From inside the walls of Brazil’s maximum security prison,
Marcola and other leaders of the PCC
now pulled the strings of the criminal underworld outside.
It makes good sense
for those involved in these types of illicit activities
to show loyalty on the outside
if it directly impacts how they’re going to be treated on the inside.
When the authorities tried to isolate Marcola
by moving him to a different prison,
the PCC waged a war on the police
that shut down the entire city of São Paulo.
The streets were deserted,
buses were bombed, and state buildings were attacked.
Hundreds were killed in the fighting.
It’s known as the “Attacks of May,”
where the city was shut down for basically four days.
It really stopped São Paulo.
Everybody had fear.
You’ve got 96 prisons or so spread out across three states,
simultaneously rioting.
And when the police went out to these prison units
to try to quell the prison riots,
the PCC launched these attacks in the city,
burning buses, Molotov cocktails at metro stations and banks,
and the city ground to a halt for about four days.
You ask any Paulista who was alive at the time,
they still remember this day.
It’s like the 9/11.
The PCC don’t just restrict themselves to Brazil.
In 2017, they invaded a city in Paraguay,
outgunned the police, and made off with $8 million.
There were speedboats on a river right on the border
that were waiting for those who went into the bank
to actually perform the heist.
There were large machine guns attached to these boats,
and so really military-grade equipment.
The PCC has gone in and taken over control of those territories.
And that has helped the PCC evolve
in the direction of something approaching a real drug cartel,
where it’s actually able to move drugs from source countries,
from producer countries to consumer markets across Brazil
and then over to Africa or straight up to Europe.
Now the PCC are embroiled in one of their bloodiest wars yet,
and this time it’s not the police.
In the north of Brazil, the PCC and other gangs
are fighting over territory in the Amazon region.
They’re fighting over not just the Amazonian capital within Brazil,
which is Manaus,
but they’re fighting over the right to use
very lucrative riverine networks throughout the Amazon.
This is an incredibly lucrative route for drug trafficking
because it allows Brazilian criminal organizations
to access both Colombia and Peru,
two countries that are top producers of coca.
Whether it’s warring in the jungle,
shutting down cities, or controlling the prisons,
the PCC have become a terrifying force all across South America.
When they arrive in a country,
homicide rates sour.
And their complex structure
has become gold standard for gangs around the world.
The main thing with the PCC
is it’s the criminal organization you’ve never heard of.
And I’m not sure if that’s because it’s Brazilian,
and most people are focused on Mexican criminal cartels,
but the PCC warrants a lot of attention and focus
because this is an organization about which we’re going to be talking
for years to come.