‘Brazil is getting out of control’ warns police investigator after a series of horrific massacres by rival drug gangs sweeps the country’s penitentiaries

The men on the prison roof laughed as they raised a hand-painted flag emblazoned with the initials of two of Brazil’s most dangerous drug gangs. In the yard below, other gang-members hacked the heads off prisoners from a rival mafia faction and lined them up in a row.

The horrific scenes were filmed on a mobile phone during a jail riot on 1 January in which 56 prisoners were butchered near the Amazon city of Manaus – the first in a string of violent incidents in Brazilian prisons this year.

The next day, four more inmates were killed at another prison in Manaus. Five days later, 33 prisoners died at a prison outside Boa Vista, in Roraima state in the far north of Brazil. Then, early on Sunday morning, four more prisoners were killed in another Manaus jail which had been reopened to accommodate prisoners transferred after the 1 January massacre.

In a country long used to violent crime, the savagery has appalled Brazilians: local media reports have included footage of of dismembered corpses, and messages scrawled in human blood.

Police and prosecutors have warned that a war between rival gangs to control Brazil’s lucrative drug trade has escalated to a new level of brutality – and there are signs that the battle has already moved from the country’s overwhelmed prison system to Rio de Janeiro, where it threatens to destabilise a city already reeling from a rise in violent crime.

“If security agents don’t exercise caution, there is a great chance of a bloody conflict happening all over Brazil,” Josmar Jozino, a journalist who has written extensively about organized crime, wrote on security site Ponte.



Authorities say the latest wave of prison violence began when the Manaus-based Family of the North (FDN) – which is allied with Brazil’s oldest gang, the Rio-based Red Command gang (CV) – attacked rival gang members from the First Capital Command (PCC).

Brazil’s justice minister, Alexandre de Moraes, quickly announced plans to reduce homicide and tackle drug trafficking, with five new federal prisons for 220 highly dangerous criminals and money for state prisons.

It is a drop in the ocean for Brazil’s overcrowded prisons, where 40% of over 620,000 inmates have yet to be definitively sentenced. Manaus’s Anísio Jobim penitentiary complex was packed to three times its capacity when the first massacre happened. Identifying mutilated bodies took days.

Luíz Valois, a judge who negotiated the end of the riot, told the Guardian the jail was “absurdly overcrowded but it is not the worst in Brazil”.

He described a pile of dismembered bodies as “the most horrible thing I have seen in my life”.

At least 30 inmates killed and mutilated in Brazil prison Read more

Francilene Vargas, an officer from the Roraima narcotics department who witnessed the scenes inside the Monte Cristo agricultural penitentiary on 6 January, said the gangs aimed to spread fear.

“It is a barbarity,” she said. “We cannot condone this marketing of terror.”

Vargas said that prisons in Roraima state are dominated by the PCC, Brazil’s biggest drug mafia, which was founded in 1993, a year after 111 prisoners were killed by police at the Carandiru jail.

Camila Dias, a professor of sociology at São Paulo’s Federal University of ABC who wrote a book on the gang, said it initially was formed as a response to “state violence”. The PCC offers prisoners medical assistance, legal advice and financial help for family members. It often states that its war is with the state, not other gangs.

“This ideological, political aspect is based on prison conditions,” Dias said.

The PCC has almost 30,000 members and tentacles that stretch across South America, said Lincoln Gakiya, a prosecutor in São Paulo state who has spent 10 years pursuing the gang.

“It is very close to a big company. We are talking about a monthly turnover of £5-8m,” Gakiya said. “They are just as violent, but in a more discreet way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smoke rises from the Anísio Jobim prison complex during a riot, in Manaus. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images

But it is a smaller player in Brazil’s Amazon region, where it has been fighting the Family of the North for control of lucrative drug smuggling routes from Colombia and Peru, along the Solimões river to Manaus, then on to Europe.

Formed in 2006, the Family of the North dominates the drug trade in the region. According to its handwritten statute, included in a 2015 investigation by Brazil’s federal police, its objective is “peace, justice and freedom”.

“We are the right side of the wrong life,” read a cellphone message sent to prisoners in nearby Pará state to recruit new members.

As in the PCC, members pay a monthly fee. New prison inmates swear allegiance to the gang.

“The Family of the North has been growing frighteningly quickly, baptising new members practically every day,” the police report said.

The Family of the North has allied with the Red Command – one of three rival drug gangs running Rio favelas, where Brazil’s drug trade is concentrated, and where violence has steadily increased as a much-vaunted “pacification” program has fallen apart.

Regarded by police as the most violent gang in Rio, the Red Command was founded in a hellish island jail in the 1970s by criminals inspired by the discipline of political prisoners jailed by the military dictatorship, which ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

For years it was allied with the PCC. But last September, the PCC announced a formal end to the alliance, accusing the Rio gang of killing its members.

Now police say the PCC is moving into Rio: wiretaps during an investigation last year revealed that an imprisoned PCC “general” was recruiting Red Command bosses in strategically situated favelas around the city.

During the phone calls from his cell, Gledson da Silva, known as Léo or Fantasma – or Ghost – sold the PCC as a company that was superior to unnecessarily violent Rio gangs.

“They prefer to kill each other, taking one favela from the other, to uniting to fight against the government, which is our war,” Da Silva said in one call to a potential recruit.

Now the PCC has formed an alliance with the Red Command’s bitter rivals the Friends of Friends, or ADA, threatening further instability. The ADA runs the drug trade in the huge Rocinha favela, close to upscale beach neighbourhoods like Ipanema.



Investigating Officer Antenor Lopes, who led the operation, said he believed the business-minded PCC had tired of the more chaotic Red Command’s taste for violence.

“The Red Command hides money in a box in the wall, or buried in the yard. The PCC puts it in gas stations and companies,” Lopes said.

“Brazil is getting out of control,” said Lopes.

