Armored automobiles rumbling via slim alleys. Rifle pictures cracking in heavy crossfire. Helicopters and weaponized drones firing from above. Soldiers in army gear engaged in violent fight. Bodies scattered on blood-slicked streets.
These may very well be scenes from a conflict zone. But on October 28, they unfolded not on a desolate battlefield however on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro — a postcard metropolis higher recognized for its breathtaking shoreline and vigorous bossa nova music scene.
“Operation Containment” introduced 2,500 law enforcement officials, troopers and snipers up the slopes of Rio’s Complexo da Penha and Complexo do Alemão favelas, dwelling to roughly 110,000 individuals.
Their goal was the Comando Vermelho (CV), or Red Command, a criminal group that has dominated these hillside shantytowns for many years. During the operation, at the very least 117 suspected gunmen and 4 law enforcement officials have been killed, and about 100 individuals have been arrested. Authorities mentioned they seized 118 weapons, together with 91 rifles and 14 explosive units, in addition to a ton of medication.
The raid adopted a year-long investigation into the Red Command and was triggered partly by the gang’s growth into new territories, a current surge in violence and an effort by authorities to reassert state management.
Officials referred to as the raid successful. But with at the very least 121 lifeless, and early reviews placing the toll at 132, the operation drew sharp criticism from native and worldwide human rights teams. It additionally laid naked a deep divide over the right way to confront Brazil’s entrenched organized crime syndicates.
“It’s not the first time we see blood being spilled for a ‘greater good,’” mentioned Thainã de Medeiros, who lived in Complexo da Penha for 35 years. “But this ‘good’ never comes.”
Now a neighborhood organizer and member of an anti-violence collective who works within the favela, Medeiros is not any stranger to how the Red Command instills worry in its territories. “You walk around and see people carrying big rifles on every corner, standing by your door with grenades and pistols,” he mentioned. “No one feels safe. And there is always the risk of instability — of another operation like this.”
The gangs additionally “determine who gets in and operates inside the communities,” mentioned Rafael Alcadipani, a member of the Brazilian Forum on Public Security, a nonprofit civic group. “Internet companies, for instance, need to pay them a fee to offer service in the area. They issue permits for people to build houses — not the government.”
The rise in violence, weaponry and gang management in the favelas has made it more and more tough for presidency officers and police to entry these areas.
“The state abandons these communities, and then gangs end up gaining even more control,” Alcadipani mentioned.
Brazil’s criminal organizations have additionally prolonged their attain from the unlawful economic system to politics via such means as vote-buying, violence, intimidation and the funding of political candidates, as research and police investigations have discovered, serving to them to turn into one of the vital highly effective gangs in South America.
Luiz Lima, a right-leaning congressman representing Rio, defended the October 28 raid as unavoidable.
“It was a necessary operation,” Lima instructed NCS. “What happened that day — 117 criminals killed — happens every day in Brazil. With more than 38,000 homicides last year, “that’s 106 deaths a day,” he mentioned.
Lima insisted that the general public backs a harder stance and that the overwhelming majority of favela residents supported the operation.
“The people living there are extorted,” he mentioned. “Their shops are extorted. Women are raped by traffickers. It’s unbearable.”
But Daniela Fichino, deputy director of the human rights group Global Justice, blames “a state policy that defines an entire population as disposable.” She added: “Brazil doesn’t have the death penalty, and yet the state acts as if it does — simultaneously finding, prosecuting and executing young, Black, poor residents under the banner of public security.”
The end result, Fichino mentioned, is “a perpetual cycle of war that reinforces the very criminal structures it claims to dismantle.”
The debate over lasting options reveals the complexity of how criminal organizations have grown so highly effective, weaving themselves into practically each layer of Brazilian society over time.
The Red Command was based in 1979 inside an island jail off the coast of Rio, the Cândido Mendes Penitentiary, the place frequent criminals have been locked up alongside leftist political prisoners against the Brazilian army dictatorship that dominated the nation from 1964 to 1985. In the tough situations there, what started as an casual alliance for cover quickly turned an organized community.
One of its founders, William da Silva Lima, spent greater than 30 years behind bars after being convicted of armed theft, extortion and kidnapping. In jail, he turned a spokesman for different inmates and negotiated with authorities.
The deplorable situations contained in the nineteenth-century Cândido Mendes — lengthy recognized amongst inmates because the “Cauldron of Hell” — pushed prisoners to set up in resistance, da Silva Lima wrote in his 2010 guide, recounting the origin of the Red Command and his half in creating the Brazilian organized crime group.
When political prisoners have been launched in 1979, da Silva Lima wrote, members of what was then referred to as the Falange Vermelha or Red Phalanx, started orchestrating mass jail breaks and investing in the burgeoning cocaine commerce.
By 1985, the Red Command managed roughly 70% of all drug-selling factors in Rio — and town’s deadly turf wars with different factions started.
According to Márcio Sérgio Christino, a São Paulo state criminal prosecutor and creator of a guide on the gangs, whereas the Red Command is Brazil’s oldest faction, it isn’t the largest — though its current growth reveals it goals to realize that aim. Its major impediment shouldn’t be the police or the federal government, he mentioned, however a competing faction: larger, higher organized and extremely influential in South America.
Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), or First Capital Command, is a criminal group created in 1993 that additionally has its genesis in a jail — the Taubaté Penitentiary in São Paulo. Its founders have been survivors of the Carandiru bloodbath the 12 months earlier than, when 111 inmates have been killed by army police.
It wasn’t till February 2001 that the group revealed its full attain. In what turned referred to as the “big rebellion,” PCC members coordinated uprisings in 29 prisons concurrently. About 27,000 inmates have been concerned, leaving at the very least 16 killed and 77 injured, amongst these incarcerated and law enforcement officials. At the top of the 27-hour rebellion, the flag of the PCC — black and white, some accompanied by handmade indicators studying “peace and justice” — was raised throughout São Paulo’s penitentiaries. The message was clear: the state had misplaced management.
“At first, their focus was … controlling the prison environment,” Christino defined. “Then they began to grow, to organize, and one of their main pillars became the drug trade.”
To get hold of a higher-quality provide of cocaine, the PCC expanded into Brazil’s border states with Bolivia and Paraguay — two of South America’s major cocaine sources. With the US market already dominated by Mexico and Colombia, cocaine producers in landlocked Bolivia targeted on reaching Europe, and a deal was struck.
“Bolivia agreed to sell only to the PCC,” Christino mentioned. “In return, the PCC handled transport, logistics and sales — to Europe, Africa, and beyond.”
Until then, the Red Command and PCC weren’t enemies. But their fragile coexistence collapsed as soon as the Red Command, blocked from Bolivia, turned to Peru and constructed a cocaine commerce that operates virtually fully inside Brazil. Notably, the gang got here to dominate provide routes via the northern a part of the nation, utilizing the foremost rivers and their tributaries of the Amazon area.
Competition over these routes ignited a collection of jail riots and massacres throughout northern Brazil, Christino mentioned.
“If you look at those uprisings — dozens, sometimes hundreds of deaths, even cannibalism — that was all about the routes,” he mentioned. “It was a territorial war.”
The syndicates now conflict for management of Brazil’s highways, rivers and prisons as they department out into different criminal realms.
A 2025 research by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security discovered that gangs such because the Red Command and PCC generated 146.8 billion Brazilian reais ($27 billion) in 2022 via the unlawful commerce of gold, gas, alcohol and cigarettes — practically 10 instances greater than from cocaine trafficking, which was estimated at 15 billion reais ($2.8 billion).
They additionally have interaction in cash laundering and make investments in development corporations, transport corporations, gas distributors and even crypto markets to clean billions of reals in illicit earnings.
Inside the command facilities: An ongoing battle
Investigations by the Public Ministry of Rio de Janeiro present that gang leaders proceed to subject orders from behind bars — via coded messages, letters and encrypted apps.
While high-risk inmates have been remoted in particular person cells, the move of data by no means really stops, mentioned Christino. “There’s no such thing as absolute isolation,” he mentioned. “Cellphones still get in, and when they don’t, messages travel through lawyers or visitors. There’s always a way.”
In an announcement to NCS, the Federal District’s Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration mentioned that “intelligence units operate in close coordination with other security forces and the judiciary to monitor faction-linked inmates.” They work to find out an inmate’s place in the hierarchy and isolate leaders “to prevent them from issuing orders,” the secretariat mentioned.
Despite these measures, investigators acknowledge that Brazil’s penitentiaries stay the spine of command and communication for its largest criminal organizations — a paradox that the state struggles to comprise.
“The state’s militarized response only strengthens the factions,” Alcadipani mentioned. “Each operation kills dozens, but the leadership remains. For every man who dies, another fills the gap … What we have now is reactive — a war without an endgame.”
“We were about to launch a partnership with UNICEF” to assist favela youth enter the job market, mentioned Medeiros, the neighborhood organizer. Career festivals have been scheduled for the day after the deadly operation in the Rio favelas. “We had to cancel everything,” he instructed NCS.
“Honestly, I thought today I’d be finalizing the details for that beautiful day,” he mentioned. “Instead, we were cleaning bodies from the streets. And now, we’re bracing for what’s next.”