Brazil's drug gangs are on the rise,
taking control of the international cocaine trade
and of Brazilian cities themselves.
In this episode, we’re looking at how these gangs operate
using extreme violence to seize power and defend their territory.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs:
why people use them
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds about their research
into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[NEWS ON DRUGS]
Nico Vorobyov has covered the global drug trade
from Colombia to Japan.
Today, he’s talking about his experiences with the dealers
and hitmen of Brazil's deadliest drug gangs.
Nico, welcome to
Glad to be here.
So how does a guy from Bristol, UK,
end up hanging around drugs gangs in Rio de Janeiro?
Once upon a time, I was a bit of a naughty boy.
I was selling drugs on the university campus,
mostly coke, weed, MDMA.
So everything you need for a night out.
And also at illegal rave parties.
One day, I very stupidly got caught and wound up in prison.
And while I was locked up,
I started writing letters to the outside.
People said I was good at writing,
and that kind of turned into a career.
And eventually, I wrote my first book,
exploring the war on drugs all over the world,
from South America to the Far East.
And what was your first experience of the favela drug scene in Brazil?
A favela is basically a squat settlement
in Rio de Janeiro and other cities.
And for a long time, you couldn’t even find them on the map because,
officially, they didn’t exist.
And now that’s led to a situation
where drug gangs directly control a lot of these areas.
And I mean, if you go there,
it really looks like you’re in a rebel-held area in a civil war
because you’ve got lads walking around openly
with machine guns across their shoulder,
wearing flip flops— flip flop insurgency, basically.
I called my friend in Rocinha,
which is the biggest favela in Rio de Janeiro,
and he invited me to a funk party.
That’s basically just a massive street party every week
hosted by the drug lords.
And number one, it's a way of making money for them.
But number two, it's a way to show their presence, good or bad,
in the community.
It was a little bit surreal.
You’ve got basically these drug stalls,
where you’ve got 14, 15-year-old kids in baseball caps
selling coke, weed, ecstasy.
And then, of course, they got the security standing next to them,
the guys with the assault rifles.
And in a kind of broader picture,
how did drugs function in these communities
and across Brazilian society?
So the main commodities sold in Rio
are coke, crack, and
Most of the weed isn’t that good.
Most of it comes from Paraguay.
But they don’t just serve the local residents because,
obviously, the whole spectrum of society wants to get high.
And it’s all sold openly in the favelas
like they’re hotdogs or soda cans.
There’s no attempt to hide it at all.
Sometimes, people from the middle and upper classes
are scared kids as well because they think,
a: they’ll get robbed,
or b: the cops will nab them on the way out.
So there are these kind of go-betweens
who call themselves “airplanes.”
So you place an order with them, and they pick it up for you.
Crack is also another popular drug in Brazil,
as is coca paste, unprocessed coca paste,
[which is] generally considered more a lower classes thing,
so you can see sort of like this classism between drug users.
And then there’s also these areas in Rio,
São Paulo, and maybe other cities called crack lands,
which is exactly what it sounds like.
It’s an area where people smoke crack,
usually in a rundown area of the city.
So when we speak about gangs in Brazil,
who exactly are we talking about?
There’s a myriad of different underworld factions in Brazil.
But the two biggest and most important
are Red Command, or CV [Comando Vermelho],
which is based out of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
And then you’ve got an array of local gangs,
such as Third Command and Friends of Friends,
which are also in Rio;
Guardians of the State,
which is based in the northeast around the Fortaleza;
and the Northern Family, which is based in the Amazon.
It’s kind of like
trying to keep track of all these alliances
and who’s fighting who,
which is one of the reasons why Brazil’s murder rate is so high.
And add to that, there’s another player in the mix
who plays by a different set of rules to these drug gangs,
which is called the
who are basically made up of cops or ex-cops.
So basically mobsters with day jobs.
And these gangs really control entire areas
and districts, don’t they?
The gangs exercise authority
because the state has basically abandoned these areas.
They act as the de facto authorities in these areas.
They practice their own brand of law and order as well.
So if you're caught stealing,
you can catch a bullet through the hand or the foot.
And the police can’t really go there as they would normally
because the narcos, they’re armed to the teeth.
What’s been happening in the past several years
is the Pure Third Command,
which is a splinter faction of Third Command,
they’ve actually adopted evangelical Christianity
as their official religion.
So they’re slinging coke for Christ,
which sounds funny,
but they’ve actually become kind of like the Brazilian Taliban.
They’ve outlawed Afro-Brazilian religions.
They attack their shrines.
And they’re waging what they consider to be a holy war.
And they can get away with it because, again,
they de facto control these areas.
Some of the kids you see selling coke or selling crack
or even holding guns are about 13, 14 years old.
And also, I mean, you know, the life expectancy for these guys
isn’t very high either.
So one reason why these gangs have such successful recruitment
is basically a lack of opportunities.
I actually met one gang boss from Red Command.
He actually had a university degree, but he didn't really feel respected.
There’s still quite a lot of racism in Brazil.
He didn’t feel respected by the customers.
He didn’t feel respected by his supervisors.
Even though he was a good salesman,
he was always getting passed over for promotion.
So he was thinking like, “Fuck this.
Why should I toil away in a 9 to 5
when I could be making all this money back in my own neighborhood?”
Which sounds like it makes sense
until you factor in the life expectancy of these guys.
You don’t see very many middle-aged narcos
rolling around Rio.
And where did these gangs start?
And how did they attain so much power?
In the 1970s, Brazil was under military dictatorship.
And on the island of Ilha Grande, where the political prisoners
and members of radical left-wing groups were held,
what happened was they started mixing with the regular prisoners,
like the thieves and the stickup artists,
and they began teaching them how to rob banks using military tactics
and also their ideology.
So when they got out,
they started calling their bank robberies “expropriations.”
In the beginning, the Red Command was a communist group.
That's why they called themselves the Red Command.
But sometime around the 80s,
they more or less abandoned the class struggle
once cocaine got involved.
By that point, they had members in almost every favela in Rio.
But then, as it happens,
gang leaders within the Red Command’s umbrella
wanted a bigger piece of the pie.
So by the early 2000s, you had three splinter factions.
You had Friends of Friends, or ADA [Amigos dos Amigos],
Third Command,
and then, most recently, Pure Third Command.
The First Command of the Capital,
or the PCC [Primeiro Comando da Capital],
had a very similar origin story to the Red Command
in that it was born in prison as well.
There was a huge prison riot in São Paulo in 1992.
Police stormed the place and massacred more than 100 inmates.
And after that, the PCC was formed,
banding together to protect prisoners’ rights.
It reinforced security for the prisoners,
for example, forbidding prison rape,
which obviously made it very popular among the convict population.
The big boss of the PCC— his nickname’s Marcola.
He’s of Brazilian and Bolivian origin.
He runs the whole organization from prison.
And with Red Command,
it’s kind of like a franchise, kind of like McDonald’s,
so the different gang bosses in the different favelas,
they’ve got quite a lot of autonomy
aside from the main governing structure
of the organization itself.
And when these gangs clash,
what kind of violence are we talking about here?
The gang wars in Brazil are fought both in the streets and in prison.
And for decades, the PCC and the Red Command
had an uneasy peace.
But that all blew up in 2017
when they clashed over drug trafficking routes to the Amazon.
Fifty-six inmates were killed in the first prison riot.
Like, absolutely butchered, their heads thrown over the walls.
At the same time, you’ve got a street war waging
between all these different drug factions,
as well as the police and the
The major beef in Rio right now is between the
which is the mafia of crooked cops,
and Red Command.
But obviously, the
And actually, about that,
there’s another whole type of violence,
which is when the police get involved.
How does law enforcement even fit into this?
Brazil was the first country in the Americas to outlaw marijuana
back when Rio banned it in 1830.
And it was already racialized back then
because it was seen as something associated with the slaves,
so the slaves brought it over from Africa.
It was also the last country in the Western Hemisphere
to outlaw slavery in 1888,
the legacy of which we’re still dealing with today.
So people who are lighter skinned tend to be better off,
where it’s often Black and brown people
who suffer the most in the war on drugs.
When the police launch an anti-drug operation,
they’ve got to go all-out.
It’s almost like a military operation,
with armored personnel carriers and helicopters.
They've literally got to invade and occupy the favela.
And when that happens, they just shoot anything that moves.
So by 2019, police in Rio were killing five people a day,
most of whom were young, Black, and poor.
And, you know, I’ve interviewed police.
I’ve interviewed members of BOPE,
which is the elite team unit of the Rio police.
And I know that they’re coming under fire as well,
but there’s also plenty of very credible reports
and even videos of the police executing suspects
or just little girls getting caught in a shootout.
This year, in just one operation, 26 people were killed in one day.
And that was the bloodiest operation in the history of Rio since last year
when 28 people were killed in one day.
And did you ever feel in personal danger there?
When I went to interview the boss of Red Command in Rocinha,
I cleared it with everyone beforehand,
so everyone knew I was coming.
And it actually turned out that me and him had the same birthday,
and he invited me to his barbecue the next day.
But the thing is, to make the interview worth his while,
I also bought a couple of ecstasy pills off him,
which me and my girlfriend ended up taking that night.
So the next day, you know,
I was in no condition to go to any drug lord’s barbecue.
But there was one time I was taking a taxi back to my girlfriend’s house.
It was around 2:00 am, and the car’s windows were up,
so you couldn't see who was inside.
So we parked up outside our house,
and just then, a man steps out of the shadows,
dressed all in black.
He's got black jeans, black T-shirt, black baseball cap.
He’s pointing a pistol at my side of the car,
saying something in Portuguese.
The driver presses the button to slowly roll down the window.
I’m just there with my hands up sheepishly, like,
“
which means “I’m a foreigner. I don’t speak Portuguese.”
And the guy obviously knew who I was by then
because I’m the only gringo in the neighborhood.
So he just puts his gun away.
He’s like, “Ha ha ha. All right, go on, then.”
But it’s not just the domestic market.
How does Brazil fit into the picture of global drug trafficking?
What we’re seeing, especially in the past several years,
is that Brazilian ports on the Atlantic coast,
like Santos and Fortaleza,
they’re becoming springboards for cocaine passing onto Europe.
And a lot of that has to do with the PCC
or the First Command of the Capital,
which started out as a prison gang in São Paolo in the 90s,
but it’s now probably the biggest crime syndicate
in the whole of South America.
And they’re actually trying to control the whole supply chain,
starting from Bolivia, then through Paraguay,
and onto the coast of Brazil,
working together with the ’Ndrangheta,
which is the Italian mafia,
who are waiting to receive it on the other end in Europe.
And PCC’s expansion over Latin America’s cocaine trade
has kicked off another cycle of violence
as they muscle in on other interested parties along that route.
The cocaine trafficking routes going through Brazil,
they’re mainly for the European and occasionally the African market.
Not so much the United States
because that’s the northward route,
so that’s supplied by Mexico, Honduras.
The African connection’s interesting because,
as well as Brazil being a former Portuguese colony,
Portugal also had colonies in Africa as well,
such as Angola and Mozambique.
And what we’re seeing now is the Portuguese language
is kind of acting as a bridge for traffickers across the Atlantic.
And quite recently,
a trafficker from the PCC, the First Command of the Capital,
was caught in Mozambique.
And Mozambique’s increasingly becoming
a waypoint for coke going to South Africa,
which is the biggest drug market in the region.
But also from South Africa,
it also travels across the African continent,
and some of it makes its way to Europe as well.
So these gangs can also operate in highly organized ways,
almost like paramilitary organizations.
There’s been quite a few instances
where the gangs have actually put on a very impressive show of force
against the state to undermine the state authority.
The one that people probably the most remember was in 2006
when prison authorities tried to move
some of the shot callers from the PCC to another prison.
And the PCC responded by basically shutting down
and laying siege to the city of São Paulo,
which is the biggest financial center of Latin America, for several days.
And they were torching buses.
They were blowing up banks.
They were going around shooting cops.
And we saw that also again at the beginning of 2019
after Bolsonaro got elected.
Because of his “tough on crime” message,
the gangs in the northeast,
which includes the Red Command and the PCC
and the Guardians of the State,
they put aside their differences,
and they launched coordinated attacks.
They cut power lines and they torched buses again,
basically to send the message to Bolsonaro
that they’re ready to fight back.
And what happens a lot is
they also invite quite a heavy response onto themselves.
So after the 2006 siege of São Paulo,
the police death squads went around executing suspects in retaliation.
And I think dozens more people died
than had actually died in the initial attack itself.
And how has the current president, Jair Bolsonaro,
tried to deal with all this trouble?
Jair Bolsonaro was elected on a very archconservative platform,
among that being tough on crime.
He was very aggressive in his rhetoric.
He was saying things like, “Crush them like cockroaches.”
The one thing that we should remember
is he isn’t calling all the shots in this situation.
In 2019, when the police really stepped up the drug war in Rio,
the city's governor was Wilson Witzel,
who was one of Bolsonaro's allies,
who filmed himself riding police helicopters
and saying things like, “Aim at their little heads and fire.”
And I’d say that he and the current governor of Rio, Cláudio Castro,
they're more directly responsible than Bolsonaro.
The police are still being given the go-ahead by the mayors
and the governors to do their thing while Bolsonaro is in charge.
And what about corruption?
Are the politicians and cops getting in on the drugs racket?
So the way Bolsonaro got votes into power
was there was all these corruption scandals
with the past ruling parties.
And both Bolsonaro and a lot of his voters
were nostalgic for the era of military dictatorship,
which was seen as maybe it was morally corrupt
in the sense that they tortured political opponents,
but it wasn’t corrupt in the sense of dodgy briefcases of cash.
But it turns out that
his government’s been just as corrupt as any of them.
There’s one funny story
where an Air Force officer in Bolsonaro’s entourage
on the way to the G20 summit
was caught with 39 kilos of cocaine.
And you could say, “OK, that was a one-off.
People fall prey to temptation everywhere.”
But then you have to start looking into the milícia.
At the beginning, when they go into an area,
they pose as vigilantes.
So they say, “We’re going to defend you, ordinary citizens,
from the robbers and the drug dealers.”
And a little time goes by,
and they go around people’s doors,
saying, “You know, it’d be nice if you guys chipped in
for some security every now and then.”
And then, when they’ve got a firm foothold,
then it’s more like, “Nice ice cream store you got there.
It’d be a shame if it all melted.”
So basically, they’re like a mafia.
And actually, my ex-girlfriend,
she lived in an area controlled by
and she paid her electricity bills through them.
So the
in the whole neighborhood.
And there was one
called the Crime Bureau,
which assassinated Marielle Franco,
who was a popular, young, Black politician in Rio
who campaigned against police brutality.
And the head of that death squad
was actually awarded the medal by Bolsonaro’s son
while he was facing another murder charge,
while the shooter himself
was literally one of Bolsonaro’s neighbors.
There’s photos of them together,
and apparently, his daughter had been dating Bolsonaro’s son.
I’m not saying that Bolsonaro had anything to do with the hit.
But, you know, looking at the kind of people he hangs out with,
you start asking questions.
And 2022 is an election year in Brazil.
How do you see the future of the narco trade playing out there?
In October this year, Bolsonaro is going to be running against Lula,
who was one of Brazil’s most popular presidents.
It’s unlikely that Lula is going to be as aggressive as Bolsonaro,
and it’s probably fairly accurate to say
that the war on drugs in Brazil
has gone beyond a left or a right issue.
On the one side, you’ve got groups like Left Command,
who have almost communist roots, you could say,
and they’re a drug gang.
On the other hand, you’ve got the
who are very obviously far right,
affiliated with the Bolsonaro family.
So it’s hard to imagine drug policy there
becoming progressive anytime soon.