Brazil's Urban Security Challenge
By Graham Denyer Willis, on
In Brazil, organized crime is a difficult subject to tackle. This is at least in part because the dynamics of organized crime and violence in Brazil have been changing dramatically in recent years. Historically, violence and crime have been synonymous with Rio de Janeiro’s favelas: marginal parts of the city where poor migrants settled, building their own homes piece by piece and outside the relative safety of urban services and regulation. Beginning in the early 1990s, images, stories and local and international headlines of poor, gun-toting young black men, often shirtless but otherwise wearing soccer jerseys, were ubiquitous. The favela-covered hillsides of this iconic city—the source of Brazil’s international image—were more or less off-limits to police and controlled by the city’s “big three” drug-trafficking organizations: the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Amigos dos Amigos (ADA) and the Terceiro Comando (Third Command).
Headlines about hostage-taking on buses or in luxury hotels and other wealthy parts of the city, which circulated widely and whipped up fear, inevitably traced criminality back to the favelas, seen far and wide as the source of instability through organized violence and drug and arms trafficking. From the 1990s until just recently, such violence was public, visible and shocking—during that time, a visitor to almost any favela in the city would have been greeted with military-type assault weapons.
Violence as a component of life in the city was inescapable, because of the criminalized influence of favelas but also because of the responses of many citizens to real or perceived insecurity in the rest of the city, which included heavily armed police, buildings surrounded by razor-wire fences, fortified banks and bullet-proof cars. This era of organized crime and its pattern of violence was viscerally, if cinematically, on display in the Oscar-winning film “City of God,” and its subsequent thematic spin-offs, “Elite Squad” and “Elite Squad 2,” the latter being Brazil’s 2012 nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
Yet much has changed. Today, organized crime in Brazil has entered a new era that contrasts starkly with the old one. The workings of organized crime and its violence are becoming ever more obscured. Revenue streams, like those from drug trafficking, are more concealed, and the influence and reach of organized crime groups is simultaneously spreading and becoming less visible. No longer can organized crime be so simply explained with the favela trope or, for that matter, with the historical dynamics of crime and violence of the city of Rio de Janeiro. This is due to two factors: the growing influence of one organized crime group in Sao Paulo, known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC); and shifting public security policies in Rio de Janeiro.
In both cities, organized crime is becoming more strategic and astute, and, perhaps more problematically, is going underground. In Rio de Janeiro, a new public security policy involving what are called Pacification Police Units, which target the openly armed presence of the big-three drug-trafficking organizations in the city’s favelas, has had the awkward spin-off effect of sweeping these organizations’ influence under the rug. This new form of community policing emphasizes narrowing the distance between the favelas’ historically marginalized citizens and the state, but sidesteps the failed policies of the drug war, implicitly acknowledging that the influence and power tied up in the revenue of the drug trade cannot be eradicated.
At the same time, para-state militias made up of off-duty police, firefighters—who are trained first as police—and prison guards have become prominent in the more far-flung and poor suburban stretches of the city. These militias have often served as a moral counterpoint to drug-trafficking groups, removing those groups from the communities and installing their own regimes of socially conservative rules, including no drugs, no public drunkenness and no hair styles resembling those associated with drug dealers. But the members of these militias are no angels. They are known to levy taxes on residents and business owners, as well as the vans used for public transportation and the motorcycle taxis that snake through the narrow alleys of these communities. Not only that, the militias also occasionally appropriate monopolies on the sale of cooking gas canisters, as well as the installation of Internet and telephone connections via illicit means, such as by rewiring lines. In one such Rio de Janeiro community, where I have lived since 2012, residents tell of strict rules and “cleansing” of suspected criminals. Still, many have expressed the sense that the shift from a drug-trafficking to a militia regime felt nonetheless like an improvement, imperfect as it certainly is.
Yet a crackdown on the militias, after a public inquiry carried out by the state assembly in 2008, has made many of these groups and their leaders leery of the public eye. Many militia leaders, particularly police and other state workers, have increasingly removed themselves from the front lines, employing ordinary citizens to collect their racketeering revenues and to mete out punishment to the noncompliant. The militias’ avoidance of scrutiny became particularly necessary when the inquiry exposed the links between some militias and city and state politicians, most of whom were never tried, much less found guilty. Still, it is no secret that come election time a key function of the militias—and some drug-trafficking groups—is to control the vote of their constituency, usually by allowing only certain candidates to put up signs.
If organized crime in Rio de Janeiro has always been fragmented and somewhat scattered, organized crime in Sao Paulo is consolidated and growing. Hundreds of documents seized recently from the flash drives of arrested PCC members who held important roles in the organization provide a telling picture: From membership registers with hundreds of names; to lists of cars and guns; and spreadsheets of weekly sales of crack cocaine, marijuana and freebase cocaine broken down by region, the documents detail the intricacies of the newest era of organized crime, defined not just by illicit revenues, but by deft divisions of labor, savvy strategy and an unprecedented degree of organization. One other document detailed a new policy within the organization that would allow members recently released from prison access to a $2,500 loan, as well as temporary borrowing rights to a gun in order to “get on his feet.”
These documents reflect a great deal about the PCC roots as a prison-based system of security that hinges on the establishment of a “peace among criminals.” Headed by a top echelon of leaders being held at a prison in Presidente Venceslau in western Sao Paulo state, and regional leaders in a prison called Avare, the PCC was founded for the self-protection of its members in the aftermath of the 1992 Carandiru prison massacre, in which 111 inmates were killed by police, most while huddled in their own cells. Within months, prisoners had drafted a statute that outlined the rules and conditions of membership and punishment in the PCC.
The PCC’s founding statute, which was revised in 2011, details the ways that members are kept in “syntony.” “We are not members of a country club,” the newest statute states, “but members of a criminal organization fighting against the everyday exploitation and injustice that affects us.” The 2011 revision further asserts an “ethic of crime” under which personal interests are secondary to the “ideals” of the organization, and excludes certain types of people and behaviors such as “rapists, homosexuals, pedophiles, rats, liars, cowards, oppressors, blackmail, extortion, jealousy [and] slander.” Personal revenues from drugs and crime—such as from robberies, bank heists and carjackings—are also seen as subordinate to the interests of the organization, to be used when necessary to further the demands of the organization’s “ideology.”
The PCC system is not rudimentary in scale either. According to one public security official who I spoke with, the PCC controls 135 of Sao Paulo’s 152 prisons—all of them except those for women, the mentally infirm, former police officers, sexual predators and foreigners, as well as a handful under the control of two much smaller groups.
Estimates of PCC membership range from more than 400,000—a few thousand more than the total population of the 135 prisons estimated to be under PCC control—to just a few thousand who have been formally “baptized” into the organization. But formal membership is not an accurate measure of the PCC’s reach. In Sao Paulo state, police wiretaps and investigations have revealed that the group is broken down into at least eight regional parts: one for each of the five regions of the city of Sao Paulo, plus one each for the lowlands around the city of Santos, the cities of the interior and Greater Sao Paulo, a region known as the ABC. At each of these levels, which are also broken down into various sub-districts, there are at least six divisions of labor that cover everything from revenue collection, legal work and keeping membership registers to punishment.
After emerging from the prison system in the early 2000s, the PCC extended its influence far beyond. It has now established control over many of the most violent parts of cities in Sao Paulo state, particularly in Greater Sao Paulo, expanding the spatial as well as the criminal reach of the organization. As had been the case inside the prisons since the mid-1990s, in order to commit a crime in a place under PCC control a person must now first receive prior authorization from either the local PCC leader, a higher-level leader or, for the most serious cases like murder, both. For those who disobey the rules, there are “tribunals” complete with a prosecution, defense and judges, who are either local leaders or PCC members known as “disciplinas” (disciplinarians) reached via cell phone. Police wiretaps have captured these tribunals in their entirety; one of them lasted multiple days and had lunch breaks and overnight recesses. In that case, neither the “defendant” nor the “prosecutor” was a member of the PCC, but the outcome was no less severe: For having shot and killed a man during a disagreement, the defendant was sentenced to death.
But the PCC’s “governance” over death has some surprising consequences. As my research accompanying homicide detectives in Sao Paulo shows, official homicide rates dropped in the same urban districts where the PCC was active by up to 80 percent. In some cases, and particularly where there is ambiguity in the details, the PCC has been known to give defendants a stark choice: die, or turn themselves in to police.
The PCC’s ability to turn around the most violent parts of Sao Paulo—places like Jardim Angela, which UNESCO once called “the most dangerous neighborhood on earth”—has reflected well on politicians and police. Just last year the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime featured Sao Paulo as a “best practice” case of homicide reduction (.pdf)—a worrisome conclusion that is based on the statistics of the same public security system that interacts with the PCC day in and day out but denies its existence.
Clearly, the PCC’s ability to conceal its influence has been a good thing for the organization, which has been able to expand its reach and keep its members and communities “safe,” but also for those elected officials that voters expect to keep them safe. But with both parties pleased, the prospect of change at the ballot box is nothing short of illusory.
Yet sometimes that balance of relative peace goes horrifically awry. On two occasions, the PCC has taken issue with its treatment at the hands of the state and used formidable violence to express its displeasure. In 2006, following the mass transfer of prisoners without food, water or adequate clothing, the PCC mounted an attack on the city, coordinated by cell phone. Over three days, more than 50 police and penitentiary workers were assassinated, dozens of buses were burned, and banks and police stations were bombed. The attacks turned Sao Paulo, an urban area of nearly 20 million inhabitants, into a virtual ghost town for five days, as police retaliated in exponentially more violent ways.
In 2012, another explosion of violence occurred after a group of six PCC members was executed by police. The PCC leadership sent word to members that any execution of a PCC member by police should be met with equal violence. For eight months the organization sought out police and assassinated them in their homes, in their cars, on the street and at their second or third jobs. By the end of the year, 106 police had been killed—a number that was small in comparison to the retribution killings carried out by both on-duty and off-duty police.
This pattern of relative peace interspersed with periods of feud-like violence also reflects the growth of the PCC outside of Sao Paulo. In 2012, the southern city of Florianopolis experienced a wave of violence from the Primeiro Grupo Catarinense (PGC), the PCC’s affiliate in Santa Catarina state. Mirroring the PCC’s action in Sao Paulo, the PGC attacked police and burned buses following a series of filmed incidents of prisoner mistreatment. Santa Catarina officials accepted offers of support from the federal government for its investigation as well as other resources—unlike in Sao Paulo, whose governor has always been reticent to accept similar offers of support from the president or the national secretary for public security.
In the northern states of Bahia and Alagoas, the PCC has also allegedly been behind new patterns and surges of violence as the organization has sought to monopolize control over crime. The PCC is increasingly stretching beyond Brazil’s borders as well, in an effort to strengthen its control over the drug supply chain that stretches westward from Brazil into Bolivia and Paraguay. Internal PCC messages report purchases of weapons and goods that are transported across these rather porous borders. But Bolivia and Paraguay have also been a frequent place of refuge for members of Brazilian organized crime, supposedly out of reach of formal investigation and extorting police.
Given the PCC’s apparent, but rather quiet, surge, what is being done? A number of federal public inquiries have taken place since the early 2000s, examining everything from the gun trade to prison conditions and organized crime. But these have done little more than expose the depth and sophistication of the PCC and the weaknesses and fallibility of those charged with investigating it. In a 2006 statement to federal senators heading the inquiry on the gun trade, for example, the leader of the PCC, a man named Marcola, revealed much about the organization’s interests, as well as the names of police that had extorted him over the years—including while he was living in Bolivia—and the reason why the 2006 attacks in Sao Paulo occurred.
At the same time, day-to-day investigations of organized crime reveal much but result in little action, suggesting a deep lack of political will to dismantle the PCC. Efforts to use technology to register or jam PCC cellphones, particularly in prison, have been fruitful, leading to the collection of thousands of telephone numbers and hundreds of hours of legal wiretaps. Such technology is inexpensive and easily accessible and provides clear windows into the workings of an organization that is completely dependent on cellphones. But the data acquired is rarely put to good use.
Meanwhile, for a number of reasons, more-diligent investigation is given less priority for resources than are police with guns on the street, as both police and a broad swathe of the population prefer to see criminals end up dead than go to prison. Not only that, there is a great deal of mistrust among the two police forces—the patrolling Military Police and the plainclothes and detective Civil Police—and the public prosecutor. Sharing of data is generally discouraged for fear that an opportunistic police officer, or officers, or prosecutor will use it as an extortion tool or simply carry out a vendetta and kill the suspect—a police practice historically referred to as the suspect’s “resisting arrest followed by death” (resistencia seguida de morte). According to the internal affairs bureaus of the two police organizations, there were 546 “resistencias” in 2012.
The growth of the PCC and the cyclical pattern of violence that has followed it mirror some of the experiences in other parts of Latin America. In places like El Salvador and Mexico, violence and at times the lack of it has resulted from treaties, bonds or pacts between the state and organized crime groups. The problem is that when organized crime goes underground, employing a strategy of obscuring its activities, less becomes known or publicly discussed about its influences—political, social and on policy—that play out every day. And when politicians increasingly have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by taking on organized crime, the prospect for its growth is limitless, and the outlook for democracy is grim. This challenge is a novel but profoundly substantive consequence of the new pattern of organized crime in Brazil.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the fragmentation of security occurring in many Brazilian cities coincides with the increasingly prominent role that Brazil is playing in terms of global security. From leading the U.N. mission in Haiti, to vying for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, Brazil’s federal government has regularly evoked the importance of security policy in international relations. This reflects an emergent but awkward truth for Brazil and many other states in the contemporary world. Security is not simply a national or federal question—a matter of state “failure,” “weakness” or “fragility.” Rather, as Brazil’s largest and most economically important cities struggle with violence, in ways that are increasingly obscured but no less consequential, it has become clear that Brazil’s security is also to a large degree an urban question. And until policy begins to reflect that, the divide between national rhetoric and day-to-day reality will continue to grow.
Graham Denyer Willis is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Toronto. He recently completed a project in which he accompanied homicide and other detectives in Sao Paulo over a three-year period. This work was supported by a fellowship from the Open Society Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, among other sources. Parts of this and related research has been published in book chapters, in the Latin American Research Review (49:1) and in the New York Times, as well as other venues.
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