This month, the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS) and InSight Crime published a comprehensive report on the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), which has grown from 8 members in 1993 to a transnational criminal organization totaling more than 30 thousand members today. Together with the report, InSight Crime has published a series of case studies that illustrate:
- the way in which the PCC has grown in response to the precarious conditions in Brazilian jails;
- the rules, organization and discipline that the PCC has been able to impose on its members;
- the constant tension within the organization between the desire to control its members while also evading law enforcement;
- the entrepreneurial criminal ethos that enables PCC members to engage in remarkable strategic actions, often without central control, such as the assassination of a key rival at the Paraguayan border and the “crime of the century” against a bank security company
- the manner by which local police often demand a role in the PCC’s criminal markets, and the ways in which police extortion actually further empowers the PCC.
The PCC is now the dominant criminal organization in six Brazilian states, and has expanded into Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as the northeast of Brazil. It may exert control directly and indirectly over more than two million family members of prisoners, as well as countless more citizens in the criminal markets it dominates. This story is a fascinating one, revealing a great deal about the resilience of the PCC’s form of criminal organization, the complex relationship between criminal actors and the state, and the possibilities for criminal expansion across Brazil and its neighbors.
