The gangs, the guns and the battle for Brazil

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Just outside Thiago Braga’s martial arts gym in Rio de Janeiro, a barricade operated by a drug gang controls who passes along the road.

Dressed in Brazil football shirts, the three young men on the roadblock look no older than 16 or 17. The straps on the military-grade automatic rifles slung over their shoulders are so long the weapons hang below the waist.

“Until a few years ago, you could walk up and down this street freely but now there are three barricades along it,” says Braga, who lives in Penha, a complex of more than a dozen favelas in the north of the city. “If the kids on the barricade get killed, others take their place. It is a never-ending process — and the state is largely absent.”

Penha is one of the places that helps explain why the radical right is favourite to take power again in Brazil after winning a string of recent elections across Latin America.

If immigration is the issue that has driven a sharp right turn in the US and Europe, in large parts of Latin America it has been the demand from voters to confront the armed groups that have become a feature of life.

In Rio, drug gangs have expanded relentlessly since they first began to control some of the favelas in the 1980s, as Brazil has come to play a more important role in the global cocaine trade. Penha is one of the bases of Rio’s biggest armed group, Comando Vermelho.

According to research from the Instituto Fogo Cruzado and Fluminense Federal University, 31 per cent of Rio de Janeiro city is now directly controlled or under the influence of armed groups. That includes areas where more than 40 per cent of the population lives, nearly 3mn people. In the years since 2008 — a period during which Rio hosted both the final of the football World Cup and the Olympic Games — their territory has more than doubled.

From Rio, the problem has gone national. Comando Vermelho has a presence in 26 of the country’s 27 federal units, according to the justice ministry, while the biggest group in São Paulo, Primeiro Comando da Capital, is also in 26 areas. Researchers believe both groups now have more members than the more famous cartels in Colombia and Mexico. The US has designated both as foreign terrorist organisations.

The armed groups have become so powerful that they are starting to penetrate politics. In March, Rodrigo Bacellar, the former head of the Rio state legislature, was jailed and is awaiting trial on charges of working in favour of Comando Vermelho.

“That is the phenomenon that is keeping me up at night,” says Robert Muggah, an expert on security at the Instituto Igarapé in Rio. “You have a situation where criminal networks are infiltrating the political organs of the state . . . organised crime is metastasising and spreading from Rio and São Paulo to the rest of Brazil, which is something fundamentally new.”

The perception that Brazilian authorities have been negligent in taking on armed groups has been one of the main reasons for the emergence of a populist rightwing movement. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, is in pole position to win the presidency on October 25 after coming top in the first round of voting.

Bolsonaro, a Rio native, is promising more aggressive police operations and mega-prisons for gang members. However, critics say this is exactly what Brazil has been doing for the past three decades. Rio already has one of the highest rates of people killed by the police in the world.

Last year, police raided Penha and Alemão, a neighbouring complex of favelas, and killed more than 120 people as they tried to arrest gang leaders — the deadliest operation in Brazilian history. Many of the bodies were dumped in a field on the hill behind Braga’s gym in Penha. But it did nothing to dislodge Comando Vermelho from the favelas.

Carolina Christoph Grillo, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio, says that the rise of the armed groups has been “slowly developing for decades and could have been stopped if more effective policies had been introduced”.

But she adds that if Bolsonaro wins, “we will be doubling the bet on something that we know does not work and which actually makes the problem worse”.

Few places in Latin America have the same scale, diversity and brazenness of gang behaviour as Rio de Janeiro.

Comando Vermelho is the biggest of three different drug gangs that have a strong presence, mostly in the east and north of the city. Western Rio, by contrast, is dominated by the so-called militias: groups founded by former police officers initially to expel gangs from neighbourhoods but which moved first into extortion rackets and then drug trafficking.

In the areas they dominate, these armed groups control many aspects of life. As well as deciding who can enter, they often deal brutally with crimes such as sexual assault.

There can also be more mundane rules such as bans on noisy motorbikes or on drivers doing wheelies on busy streets. At one stage in Penha, Comando Vermelho banned people from wearing Chelsea FC strips because the name of the club’s then sponsor — telecoms group Three — was an echo of one of the rival gangs in Rio, Terceiro Comando Puro, or Pure Third Command.

There are some schools and health clinics in these areas of the city, but there is little police presence other than occasional military-style raids. Apart from the gangs, the institutional fabric is largely provided by sporadic NGOs and evangelical churches.

“If you leave a vacuum, someone is going to fill it and in favelas like this, that means crime,” says Rafaela França, who runs an NGO in Alemão.

The level of control held by Rio’s gangs used to be considered unique, a product of the city’s peculiar geography where many of the favelas are constructed on steep hills that allow only limited access.

But over the past decade the Rio model has spread across the country. Comando Vermelho has a strong presence in the Amazon region and in the north-east. O Globo, a Rio newspaper, reported that the group has so many affiliates that it created what police described as a “director for corporate governance for regional conflicts”.

The homicide rate in Brazil, which is driven in part by violence between gangs, has fallen over the past decade. However, data published last year by pollster Latinobarómetro showed that 26 per cent of Brazilians are now subject to “criminal governance”, living in areas where rules are imposed by an armed group, the highest in Latin America.

In Fortaleza, the capital of the north-east state of Ceará, the graffitied initials of Comando Vermelho are a common sight. Caught in the crossfire of gang violence, hundreds of residents have been expelled from their homes.

Sonia, a 48-year-old grandmother, describes how her son was involved with the group but then tried to withdraw. One night he and his wife were murdered in front of their children. The gang then threatened to kill her unless she signed over her property deeds.

“Overnight my life turned into a nightmare,” she says. “I felt unsupported by the police. If I tried to reclaim my house, they [the gangsters] would come after me and kill me.”

Many who live in areas controlled by armed groups describe the stigma associated with it. Muller Magela did a degree in systems management, but he works as a doorman in Barra da Tijuca in western Rio, a 90-minute bus trip each way from his home in Penha. “When you apply for a job, there is a lot of prejudice against people who come from a favela like this,” he says.

“The only time I see my neighbourhood on the TV is when there is a big police raid,” says the 24-year-old, who also gives IT classes to young people. “I just wish we could show that we do good things in our community.”

Fear and anger about organised crime have shaped recent elections across Latin America and Bolsonaro is hoping it will do the same in Brazil.

Rio was one of the main reasons for Bolsonaro’s surprisingly strong showing in the first round of voting. He won 53 per cent of votes in the state compared to 39 per cent for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

He is pushing the sorts of proposals that have proved seductive elsewhere, including for the kind of maximum-security prisons for gang members that Nayib Bukele has built in El Salvador and chemical castration for sex offenders.

Residents of affected cities often support a hardline response; a poll taken shortly after the violent police operation in Penha and Alemão found that 62 per cent in Rio supported the raid, while 88 per cent of people living in favelas were in favour.

Bolsonaro has also offered closer co-operation with Donald Trump’s administration, which wants a more military-style response to the growth of cartels in the region.

For Lula, polls show security is one of his weakest issues. To the frustration of many poorer Brazilians, a section of the left has long downplayed the need to confront armed groups, arguing that poverty reduction is the best way to resolve urban violence. Lula said last year that drug dealers are also “victims” of the cocaine trade, before apologising.

However, during his current term, the federal government has launched a number of investigations into money laundering by drug gangs. In recent days, Lula has adopted a new slogan on the campaign trail: “Protection for workers, prison for criminals.”

Bolsonaro’s plans may have popular appeal, but they have not been well received by many of the experts who study violence in Brazil. They emphasise that Comando Vermelho and the PCC were both founded inside prisons and have since used the system to recruit and build national networks.

“Putting more people in prison is not going to resolve the problem and could make these organisations stronger,” says Benjamin Lessing at the University of Chicago.

Police in Rio operate in an unusually violent environment, but they have a long record of high levels of lethality. One study showed that between 2015 and 2024, police in Rio state killed 11,550 people, more than three a day. In 2025, the figure for the greater Rio area was 460. By comparison, in recent years the New York Police Department has killed around 10 people a year. Yet despite the bloodshed, the armed groups have continued to expand.

For Bolsonaro, the issue is complicated by his long history of personal associations with people connected to the militias in western Rio.

In 2005, while in the state legislature, he nominated Adriano da Nóbrega for a medal at a time when the former policeman was jailed and awaiting trial for murder. Da Nóbrega was later accused of being a leading militia member and head of a group of contract killers. Bolsonaro also employed the wife and mother of da Nóbrega, who was killed by police in a shootout in 2020, in his office.

Bolsonaro has always vigorously denied any connection to the militias. However, his past associations will come under intense scrutiny if he becomes president, as any operations against the drug gangs will prompt questions about why the militias are not also being targeted.

For whoever wins, a campaign against the cartels is further complicated by the evidence of infiltration into politics — especially in Rio.

In September last year, TH Joias, a member of the state legislature, was arrested by the Federal Police, which accused him of acting to help Comando Vermelho, including by buying weapons and anti-drone equipment for the group.

His arrest set off a chain reaction of events. The police detained Rodrigo Bacellar, at the time the head of the Rio state legislature, who was charged with tipping off TH Joias about his impending arrest. A judge who signed the warrant was also arrested for leaking the details.

There has been a “profound infiltration of public power in Rio,” said Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court judge, at a public hearing. Lawyers for Bacellar, who says he is innocent, say “he has never had any contact with criminal groups”. Lawyers for TH Joias, who also denies the charges, did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts say there are few signs that the federal police, which investigate organised crime, have been compromised by the cartels. “They have been our firewall,” says Joana Monteiro, a former senior official in the Rio state government and attorney’s office. “It is different from Mexico, where the level of political infiltration is much higher.”

However, state and municipal governments are often a more important target for organised crime because many security and police issues are handled at local levels. As head of the Rio state legislature, Bacellar had considerable sway over police appointments in the state. “Bacellar was in a position of enormous influence over police operations,” says Monteiro, who is now a professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas.

Experts say any lasting solution has to involve a credible plan for the state to take back control of areas run by gangs. In the run-up to the Olympics, Rio tried to introduce a new model that set up police barracks in favelas and began patrolling the community. Levels of violence fell in many of the favelas where it was introduced. However, the programme in effect collapsed amid a severe economic crisis in Rio state in 2016.

“The experience demonstrated that it is possible for the state to retake control, that these groups are not so powerful they cannot be confronted,” says the University of Chicago’s Lessing.

But the sorts of policing and social investments that would be required are very expensive. “It would take a long time and there is a big fiscal cost, and we need to be upfront about that.”

In the view of some favela residents, this election will resolve little. “It is hard to say that things have got much better over the two decades [in which] Lula has been in power,” says Braga, the gym owner in Penha. “And the right wing? They just want to come in here and shoot people.”

Link To FT.com: https://www.ft.com/content/ae352ce0-06cf-4493-97e6-2881271b344f

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