The city of São Paulo, Brazil, is about to elect its next mayor, but the talk of the town is about a party that’s not on the ballot on Sunday: The “party of crime,” or as it’s formally known, the First Capital Command (P.C.C.).
Police officials recently claimed that the criminal group moved almost $1.5 billion through fintech companies, using some funds to finance candidates around São Paulo State. And one of the front-runners for São Paulo mayor, the far-right fitness coach and influencer Pablo Marçal, is running under a small political party whose president was caught on tape bragging about his P.C.C. ties earlier this year. (The party president has denied the audio is of him, but reporters from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo say they confirmed its authenticity with six independent sources.)
While Mr. Marçal has publicly criticized the P.C.C.’s alleged involvement with the party, the P.C.C.’s push into politics across the nation has been a shock for many Brazilians. While organized crime has long played a substantial role in local politics in countries such as Colombia and Mexico, this was not as much the case in Brazil until recently — thanks to the extraordinarily fast rise of the P.C.C.
The organized crime group began as a São Paulo prison gang in the early 1990s, before taking control of prisons and poor neighborhoods across that state and neighboring ones, and more recently morphing into a transnational drug cartel. Today, it is believed to have members in all of Brazil’s states, with at least 40,000 “baptized” members and 60,000 “affiliates.” It has a presence in 23 other countries as well, and a dominant hold on cocaine exports to Europe. If you haven’t heard of the P.C.C., that’s not an accident. By keeping a low profile and relying more on corruption than unconstrained violence, the organization has grown with stealth and speed.
The organization is converting its cocaine profits into political and licit business power. This year, prosecutors in Brazil have exposed that P.C.C. members have secured public contracts to run São Paulo state’s waste disposal services and hospitals. They’ve purchased luxury real estate and are under investigation for bids to trade professional soccer players. Authorities have arrested city councilors and a deputy mayor from cities in the state for having P.C.C. ties, and they are investigating others.
Now Brazil faces a reckoning: Curb the criminal organization’s power or watch its influence grow. Once organized crime money floods into politics and the private sector — as it did in 1980s Colombia and in Mexico in the decades since — it’s difficult to reverse. It can make politicians more beholden to mafias than voters, judges more responsive to crime bosses than their victims and firms allied with crime more profitable than their rule-abiding rivals.
An unchecked expansion of the P.C.C. would be destabilizing for Brazil and large parts of the world. Members of the organization now control prisons in Paraguay, own land in Bolivia, manage coca plantations in Peru and run guns through Uruguay. European port cities including Rotterdam and Amsterdam, flooded with South American cocaine, have been contending with drug-related violence. Amsterdam’s mayor has even publicly warned that the Netherlands, a destination for much P.C.C.-trafficked cocaine, risks becoming a narco-state. In 2020, a top Brazilian drug trafficker who worked with the P.C.C. was arrested alongside two Nigerian associates in Mozambique, a sign of the crime organization’s growing ties to Africa. Between 2023 and 2024, people linked to the P.C.C. have been apprehended and had assets frozen in the United States.
At home, the P.C.C. is already threatening to warp Brazilian democracy. The backdrop for the group’s meteoric rise as a transnational drug cartel was the rapidly changing Latin America of the 2010s, when increases in supply and demand for the region’s illicit goods reorganized the criminal landscape and catalyzed the growth of its mafias. The supply of coca, the staple ingredient for cocaine, grown in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, more than doubled from 2014 to 2024, while European — and to a lesser extent, Asian and African — demand for the drug surged.
Enter the P.C.C., which expanded like a multinational. In addition to taking control of prisons in Paraguay and Bolivia and Brazil’s border zones with those countries, the group constructed a massive narco-trafficking route to one of Latin America’s largest ports in Santos, Brazil, just over an hour from São Paulo. There and at other ports, it smuggled cocaine into container ships bound for the rest of the world. Today, thanks largely to the global cocaine trade, the P.C.C. is estimated to earn $1 billion annually.
The P.C.C. is not unstoppable, says Lincoln Gakiya, a Brazilian prosecutor who has investigated the organization for the past 20 years, and whom I visited in São Paulo. Despite persistent death threats from the P.C.C., Mr. Gakiya and the group of state prosecutors he leads, the Special Action Group to Combat Organized Crime, have put top P.C.C. bosses in federal prison, prosecuted the group’s money launderers and begun investigating politicians and businesspeople they accuse of enabling the group.
But that won’t be enough, Mr. Gakiya told me. To stop the “party of crime,” governments must double down on targeting the group’s finances. Brazil’s governments, its neighbors and European countries must also establish mechanisms for quickly sharing information among their police forces and prosecutors. In Brazil, the federal government should update anti-mafia laws and increase coordination among state and federal authorities, so each of Brazil’s 26 state governments is not fighting the P.C.C. on its own.
The risk is that instead of a rule-of-law-oriented 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 backed prosecutors and tried to limit the P.C.C.’s access to transport infrastructure, São Paulo’s state government has veered worryingly in the mano dura direction. From July 2023 to April 2024, under São Paulo’s current security secretary — an ally of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro — São Paulo’s military police force carried out its most lethal operation in decades. It led to at least 84 deaths in what the police describe as confrontations with suspected P.C.C. members in favelas near Santos, but which many community members allege were extrajudicial executions. Eight members of the police force are currently under arrest and investigation for suspected homicide.
Not only do such crackdowns violate human rights and alienate entire communities, they do nothing to blunt the P.C.C.’s power. Today, that rests on control over borders, money laundering networks and complicit public authorities at home and abroad — not in 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 as a dead-end. “[P.C.C. leaders] no longer live in the favelas,” he said. They live “in upper and middle-class condominiums. Maybe if the police looked there, they would find them.”
Brazilian authorities should listen to Mr. da Silva and combat the P.C.C. the right way before it grows any more commanding. The group’s push into politics, through the coming São Paulo mayoral election, is a sign Brazil must take action quickly. What Brazil does next will have regional and global consequences. If the country’s authorities treat the P.C.C. as the illicit transnational mega-business that it is — not the street gang it once was — there is still a chance Brazil might curb the group’s power in time.
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