Brazil’s largest mafia is entering politics. The government must act. – Dnyuz

The city of São Paulo, Brazil, is about to elect its next mayor, but the talk of the town is about a party that won’t be on Sunday’s ballot: the “party of crime,” or as it’s formally known, the First Capital. Command (PCC).

Police officials recently alleged that the criminal group transferred nearly $1.5 billion through fintech companies, using some of the money to fund candidates in São Paulo state. And one of the front-runners for mayor of São Paulo, far-right fitness coach and influencer Pablo Marçal, is running under a small political party whose president was caught on video bragging about his PCC ties earlier this year. (The party chairman has denied that the audio is his, but reporters from the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper say they have confirmed its authenticity with six independent sources.)

While Mr Marçal has publicly criticized the PCC’s alleged involvement in the party, the PCC’s push into politics across the country has come as a shock to many Brazilians. While organized crime has long played a substantial role in local politics in countries such as Colombia and Mexico, this has not been so much the case in Brazil until recently – thanks to the extraordinarily rapid rise of the PCC.

The organized crime group began as a prison gang in São Paulo in the early 1990s before taking control of prisons and poor neighborhoods in that state and neighboring areas, most recently evolving into a transnational drug cartel. Today it is believed that there are members in all states of Brazil, with at least 40,000 ‘baptized’ members and 60,000 ‘affiliates’. It is also present in 23 other countries and has a dominant influence on cocaine exports to Europe. If you’ve never heard of the PCC, it’s no accident. By keeping a low profile and relying more on corruption than unbridled violence, the organization has grown stealthily and rapidly.

The organization turns its cocaine profits into political and legal business power. This year, prosecutors in Brazil revealed that PCC members won government contracts to run São Paulo state’s waste management services and hospitals. They have bought luxury real estate and are under investigation for bids to trade professional football players. Authorities have arrested municipal councilors and a deputy mayor of cities across the state for ties to PCC, and are investigating others.

Now Brazil faces a reckoning: curb the criminal organization’s power or watch its influence grow. Once organized crime money flows into politics and the private sector – as it did in Colombia in the 1980s and in Mexico in the decades that followed – it is difficult to reverse this. It can make politicians more dependent on the mafia than voters, judges more responsive to crime bosses than their victims, and companies linked to crime more profitable than their rule-abiding rivals.

An uncontrolled expansion of the PCC would be destabilizing for Brazil and much of the world. Members of the organization now control prisons in Paraguay, own land in Bolivia, manage coca plantations in Peru and run weapons through Uruguay. European port cities, including Rotterdam and Amsterdam, awash with South American cocaine, are struggling with drug-related violence. The mayor of Amsterdam has even publicly warned that the Netherlands, a destination for much of the PCC-trafficked cocaine, is at risk of becoming a narco-state. In 2020, a top Brazilian drug trafficker working for the PCC was arrested in Mozambique along with two Nigerian associates, a sign of the crime organization’s growing ties to Africa. Between 2023 and 2024, people linked to the PCC were arrested and had their assets frozen in the United States.

Domestically, the PCC is already threatening to distort Brazilian democracy. The backdrop for the group’s rapid rise as a transnational drug cartel was the rapidly changing Latin America of the 2010s, when the increase in supply and demand for the region’s illicit goods reorganized the criminal landscape and fueled the growth of the mafia catalyzed. Supply of coca, the main ingredient for cocaine, grown in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, more than doubled between 2014 and 2024, while European – and to a lesser extent Asian and African – demand for the drug soared.

Enter the PCC, which expanded as a multinational. In addition to taking over prisons in Paraguay and Bolivia and Brazil’s border areas with those countries, the group also built a massive drug trafficking route to one of Latin America’s largest ports in Santos, Brazil, just over an hour’s drive from São Paulo. There and in other ports it smuggled cocaine to container ships bound for the rest of the world. Today, thanks in large part to the global cocaine trade, the PCC earns an estimated $1 billion annually.

The PCC is not unstoppable, says Lincoln Gakiya, a Brazilian prosecutor who has investigated the organization for the past two decades and whom I visited in São Paulo. Despite persistent death threats from the PCC, Mr. Gakiya and the group of prosecutors he leads, the Special Action Group to Combat Organized Crime, jailed top PCC bosses, prosecuted the group’s money launderers and began investigating politicians and businessmen they accuse of enable the group.

But that won’t be enough, Mr. Gakiya told me. To stop the “party of crime,” governments must redouble their efforts on the group’s finances. The governments of Brazil, neighboring countries and European countries should also establish mechanisms for rapid information sharing between their police forces and prosecutors. In Brazil, the federal government should update anti-mafia laws and increase coordination between state and federal authorities so that each of Brazil’s 26 state governments is not fighting the PCC on its own.

The risk is that instead of a rule of law approach, Brazilian authorities will follow a more brutal and less effective path, known in Latin America as mano dura, or iron fist. Although it has supported the plaintiffs and sought to limit the PCC’s access to transportation infrastructure, the São Paulo state government has moved worryingly in a mano dura direction. From July 2023 to April 2024, São Paulo’s military police under São Paulo’s current security secretary – an ally of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro – carried out the most deadly operation in decades. It led to at least 84 deaths in what police described as clashes with suspected PCC members in favelas near Santos, but which many community members say were extrajudicial killings. Eight members of the police force have currently been arrested and are being investigated for suspected murder.

Such repression not only violates human rights and alienates entire communities, but also does not diminish the power of the PCC. Today that relies on control of borders, money laundering networks and complicit governments at home and abroad – and not on block-by-block control of favelas. Claudio Aparecido da Silva, who grew up in a São Paulo favela and is now the state’s police ombudsman, sees mano dura like a dead end. “(PCC leaders) no longer live in the favelas,” he said. They live “in upper- and middle-class apartment buildings. If the police looked there, maybe they would find them.”

The Brazilian authorities must listen to Mr da Silva and fight the PCC properly before it becomes even more dominant. The group’s move into politics, through the upcoming mayoral elections in São Paulo, is a sign that Brazil must take swift action. What Brazil does next will have regional and global consequences. If the country’s authorities treat the PCC as the illegal transnational mega-corporation that it is – and not the street gang it once was – there is still a chance that Brazil will curb the group’s power in time.

The message Brazil’s largest mafia enters politics. The government must act. first appeared in the New York Times.