Criminal gangs expand into the Brazilian Amazon and turn once peaceful communities into killing fields

By Eleonor Hughes

Criminal gangs are operating in over a third of municipalities in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest driving a boom in violence, according to a report published Wednesday by a prominent nonprofit organization.

Illegal gold mining is one of the activities attracting organized gangs to Brazil’s vast Amazon region.

In 2024, gangs were present in 260 of 772 municipalities in the region, up from 178 last year, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety. The entrenchment of “mafia-like” organizations — particularly the Red Command and First Capital Command (PCC) — “greatly aggravate the situation in the Legal Amazon, which is now seen as a very strategic territory for transnational trafficking and illegal mining, with the circulation of different illicit goods,” the report said.

The Legal Amazon is an area in nine states of Brazil that’s home to the largest hydrographic basin in the world.
Of the 260 municipalities where organized crime groups are present, Red Command controls fully half, up from one-fourth last year, Renato Sérgio de Lima, the nonprofit’s president, told The Associated Press.

Red Command expanded into cities in Brazil’s northern region after PCC took control of the drug trafficking route via Ponta Pora, a municipality on the border with Paraguay in the center-west region. Red Command has since swallowed up some local factions that no longer function autonomously, Lima said.

The killings of Indigenous peoples expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in 2022 threw into sharp relief the increase in violence in the region. They were traveling along the Itaquai River near the entrance of the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, which borders Peru and Colombia, when they were attacked. Their bodies were dismembered, burned and buried.

Brazilian police have formally charged a Colombian fish trader as the person who planned their slayings. The killings were motivated by Pereira’s efforts to monitor and enforce environmental laws in the region, police have said. Phillips was working on a book about Amazon preservation.

Federal Police detective Alexandre Saraiva, who led police departments in three Amazon states between 2011 and 2021, knew both Phillips and Pereira. “There’s no shadow of a doubt” that organized crime in the region has increased in recent years, he said.

The expansion of criminal organizations in the Amazon happened at the same time as the growth of illegal gold mining, Saraiva said, which sharply increased under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who encouraged the practice.

After defeating Bolsonaro in the 2022 election and returning to office for a third, non-consecutive term in January 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to tackle crime and deforestation in the region. While deforestation has decreased, the report shows his administration has had little success in reigning in the expansion of drug gangs.

“Today, might makes right in the Amazon,” Saraiva, who authored the book “Jungle: Loggers, Miners and Corruption in a Lawless Amazon,” said by phone from Rio. He said some Brazilian lawmakers and local politicians were also responsible for the situation and accused them of receiving funds from criminal groups in exchange for protection.

Criminal organizations’ grip over the region poses a public security problem, but it is also an obstacle to the development of sustainable practices experts say are essential for its preservation.

Tackling drug trafficking, environmental crimes, land-grabbing and other illegal actions requires coordinated, multi-pronged public policies as well as local development projects, the report said.
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Credit: Associated Press