Brazil's Red Command Rules the Favelas
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The country's been under a military dictatorship for over a decade. And like everywhere else in Latin America at the time, there's a bunch of different rebel and guerrilla groups forming and fighting, many of them preaching leftist revolutionary doctrine. They're running around, kidnapping officials, robbing banks, all that kind of fun stuff. But there's other things happening too. The population in major cities like Rio is growing at a really high rate. As people from the countryside set up shop in shanty towns in all the surrounding hills, the economy is actually booming.

But the slum dwellers aren't seeing much of a benefit. And some of them decide they're going to get money that ski mask way. William Da Silva Lima is one of those types. A real old school bandit. He's a pickpocket before he's finished puberty. And he soon graduates to robbing banks. He's good at the robbing part, but not too good at the getting away with it part. Soon he finds himself locked up with a serious sentence. And troublemaker that he is, he eventually gets sent to a maximum security island prison where the worst of the worst are kept.

And those leftist guerrillas and rebels I mentioned earlier, they're not too good at avoiding the law either. Pretty soon a bunch of them get locked up too. And since the military government wants to teach them a lesson, seeing these political prisoners as a serious threat, they get transferred over to the maximum security Alcatraz-like island prison too, joining William and some of the other hardcore criminals.

You see, the rebels, they're all middle class kids, right? College educated. They read books on theories. And the jailers and government figure, the gangsters and murderers and bank robbers, you know, real street type dudes. They're going to eat these guys alive. Just beat the crap out of them and do other things I won't mention because this is a family podcast. Besides, they probably figured, what's the worst that could happen?

Welcome to another episode of the Underworld Podcast. I am your host, Danny Gold, and I'm here as always with Sean Williams. Sean, what is going on? Not a lot in lockdown, man, but I'm probably getting closer to that trip that I keep saying I'm going to go on. So that's something that I'm looking forward to. I mean, we've got more going on online with our...

With our website, we've got the merch up. We've got the Patreon. We've got Amazon reading lists. We've got loads of stuff going on there. That is true. Underworldpod.com. People have been buying the t-shirts and the hats and kind of sending us photos of themselves in them, which is cool. Do that because it helps us keep doing this. Yeah. And send us pictures of you wearing the merch at like the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal or something. We could do a prize for the best underworld merch selfie or something like that.

If you do it in like a holding cell, I feel like that would be automatic like first, but we'll send you extra like additional free merch if that happens. Yeah, cool. So today we are going to do the story of the Red Command in Brazil. It's the oldest massive criminal group in the country and once the most powerful, though that's changed a bit as we'll get into it.

But if you've ever seen those videos or documentaries of gangs and favelas in Brazil, you know, sort of like picturesque hills overlooking the beautiful beaches of Rio where it's teenagers and tank tops and flip-flops and they're holding AK-47s as they watch over outdoor stalls with just giant amounts of cocaine and crack being sold, that's probably the red command. When Rio got the World Cup and the Olympics one after the other in the mid-2010s, there was a lot of focus on them as the police and military in Rio went in to try to clean them out of some of the neighborhoods.

And it looked like a lot of legit war zone stuff, right? You had reporters in vests and helmets tagging along with the police, you know, who are super kitted out. They look like a military squad. They have their own history of gang-like behavior and killings as well. They would engage in like legit multi-hour firefights with these gangs. Though, to be fair, I mean, I do wonder how effective these gangs really are at carrying out firefights and legit operations. I mean, they do kill a lot of police, but I don't think they really have the same level of high-level training as cartels in Mexico do.

You know, these those operate like real militaries. But from what I've seen in Brazil, it's a lot more kind of prey and spray, but they're certainly effective. I reckon if you're using the phrase prey and spray, you probably got a bit of work to do cleaning up a neighborhood, right? Yeah. I mean, that's not a good thing to have in an urban environment when you're not fighting a war.

And for those who don't know what that means, it's kind of like, you know, if you watch footage of definitely a lot of the military conflicts during the Arab Spring, you'd see a lot of guys just sort of like reach their gun over a barrier or a berm and just sort of like, you know, shoot just anywhere, like not aiming it, close their eyes. That's what they call the famous prey and spray or spray and pray, whatever you want to say. But the

The other thing I think people know these Brazilian gangs from is throwing, you know, those huge, massive outdoor parties with Baile Funk, that Brazilian version that's kind of like dance hall. And it makes for a really good time. It really had a moment in like late 2000s

in in brooklyn i think but i'm forgetting like the name of the bands that were that were everywhere sean was that like a thing in berlin as well i mean that's like similar to reggaeton if it's not i don't know what it is nah it didn't really i mean it's just techno all the way here if it's not techno it's nothing let's be honest though like around that time frame you like you don't really remember much that was going on anyway we know the kind of life you yeah i was i was way out of somewhere no recollection whatsoever it all just it all just blends together

I was actually supposed to go do an assignment in Brazil, I think like maybe six months before the pandemic popped off and I never got around to it. It kind of got pulled the last second, which really sucks because it's a topic I've wanted to cover forever. It's like,

fascinating country, gigantic country too. I think what the fifth biggest country in the world. Yeah, it's huge. And maybe it's one of those things like I feel like I don't see enough news from it. But generally when people complain about someone not covering a place, it's usually because they're not looking for it.

But yeah, it's a fascinating country and hopefully we'll get you guys interested in it as well as we go through this. A lot of this info comes from Johan Grillo's book, Gangster Warlords, which is a phenomenal read. And we interviewed him about his new book on the Patreon, patreon.com slash the underworldpodcast.com.

So buy his book, buy his old book, buy his new book. It's on the reading list for, you know, it's on Amazon and he's just a legit good dude. So hopefully he won't mind me cribbing notes from his book. We got enough to like, we got enough to like last year, your whole, what is it? Like everyone's getting their Zoom bookcases sorted out at the moment. So you can do that. Just put every single book on our list in your bookcase and look really, really cool. That's actually, that's a really good idea. Yeah.

Brazil. Brazil was a Portuguese colony until 1822, but an emperor took over after and slavery there actually lasted until 1888, which is longer than the US, which I found kind of surprising. Did you know actually that Rio was once actually like the capital of Portugal as well? Like when Napoleon rolled into Lisbon and the royal family jumped ship literally across the Atlantic, it's all pretty crazy. Yeah.

And I guess there's like so many problems with colonialism that you're going to get into in this episode as well. But yeah, it's just a nice little quiz fact for people. I actually, I did not know that. So thank you for, for, for, you know, coming forth with that, Sean. I really appreciate it. Always happy.

Brazil actually had an African slave population that was much bigger than where the US is right now. And the slaves there worked on sugar and coffee plantations as well as in the wood industry. I mean, do you say wood industry, logging? I don't know. Like whatever it was, it was a crime against humanity and it sucked. But slavery ends.

In 1888 and freed slaves left their masters and plantations and many went to Rio, which was the capital then and set up shop in the hills, claiming land and giving way to shanty towns that would later become the favelas.

They were soon joined by soldiers. And the origin story of one favela in Rio is how in the 1890s, a number of soldiers who had been sent south to crush a sort of cult-like group of former slaves and peasants led by a preacher named Anthony the Counselor. That's a good name. Yeah. We really need to do some cults on this show. Actually, guys, let us know which cults we should cover because I guess they need to be gangs, but they kind of all are, right? Yeah.

I mean, I think when we run out of gangs and organized crime stuff, we can move into like cults and militias and all that. People seem to dig that stuff. Somewhere around like series 28 or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, these, these soldiers, they were promised land as payment, but they get back to Rio after crushing the rebellion and,

And of course, they don't get their promised land. So they too start squatting up in the hills. So all these little shantytowns spring up and government after government just does nothing for them, right? No planning, no resources. The population's increasingly marginalized. There's no sewage system in some of them, even today. And

And 11.4 million Brazilians out of a population of over 200 million live in these slums still. So like, what is a slum and what is a favela? Or is a favela just like the Portuguese name for a slum or whatever? I think you're not supposed to even say slum. I mean, I can't keep track of this stuff. But favela, yeah, I guess it's like, you know, I don't know the exact...

It's kind of like, you know, these like kind of almost unofficial communities, I think that spring up in the hills that they might not be incorporated. Look, I'm not sure of the specifics, but essentially it's, you know, the slums that are surrounding these cities. Yeah. If I'm wrong, you know, yell at me at Twitter, yell at me on my email. Just, you know, do whatever you can. Yell at Danny on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. I need to, I need to learn from my mistakes, but yeah, it's, it's crazy to think about how big Brazil is and, and you know, 11.4 million people, uh,

Living in these favelas and the population is over 200 million. It's just a massive country. And I feel like the people just don't know a lot about it. Or maybe that's just me and I'm overcompensating. Yeah, that's not for the one of Bolsonaro. Yeah. Well, yeah. I feel like you see that guy in the media every day. He's trying his best. Yeah. Yeah. He really is putting it on the map for all the wrong reasons. But here's John Lee Anderson, a fantastic reporter in The New Yorker about a decade ago in an article about the gangs talking about the slaves starting what turned into the favelas. Quote,

They were joined by unemployed former soldiers and more recently by Brazil's rural poor who flooded the city fleeing chronic drought and poverty. 20 years ago, they were set to be 300 favelas in Rio. 10 years ago, the number had climbed to 600. No one knows exactly how many favelas there are today, but it is estimated that more than a thousand exist, housing perhaps 3 million of Rio's 14 million inhabitants. And remember, this is 2010.

Anyway, this history is important because despite this sort of outwardly portrayed image of Brazilian society as not having a ton of issues when it comes to race and racism, that there is a racial divide. And the favelas in Rio tend to be mostly people of African heritage, though, of course, it's this mixture of Brazilian culture. So you do have whites and indigenous and Portuguese and all that. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. So William, the guy we talked about before, he's known as the teacher.

He was born in the northeast of Brazil in the 1940s to sugarcane plantation workers. The workers there, among them his grandfather, they gave him his first taste of revolution, protesting and fighting police over labor issues. Eventually, he moved to Sao Paulo with his dad, but he left school at 12 years old to work. Bit of a slacker. Yeah, seriously. For a time, William was working for a landlord, helping collect rent checks, but he hated the man and started stealing from him. Eventually, he got caught and fired.

He then went to work as a pickpocket. You know, you don't really see a lot about pickpocket these days. I feel like it's an older, older profession, you know, 1950s, 1960s guys wearing hats with pocket watches. It just seemed like a really cool way to get your criminal career started back then. And like an art form. And you don't really see maybe in like oceans 11 movies, but I feel like it's a dying art form. Yeah. It's sad. Yeah.

Bring back, bring back pickpockets. Yeah. Especially like little teenage pickpockets, you know, I guess no one carries cash anymore. Right. So it's kind of like, uh, imagine you go through all the trouble of stealing a businessman's wallet. It's a bunch of credit cards that you can't use. You just get an Apple pay. Yeah. Just do online fraud. It's so much easier. Soon enough, he got arrested at the age of 17 and spent four days in jail before his father freed him and then angrily left him in the street to fend for himself.

Instead of this causing William to, you know, rethink his life and go on the straight and narrow, he went right back to pickpocketing more and soon headed to Rio now on his own.

He gets to Rio. He got to work right away, robbing, stealing. He gets arrested at 19 for burglary and sentenced to five years in prison. And in prison, he had to fight off other prisoners in Brazil's like crazy, brutal jails and also suffered brutal beatings from the guards too. Brazil's jails, I mean, back then they were bad. Now they're notorious as well for being somewhat like the worst in the world. They have like regular massacres there with dozens dead. So I can't imagine what it was like back then.

Pretty much probably unpleasant. Yeah, probably quite unpleasant. Yeah. I mean, I want to get a shout out for this amazing William Langeveche piece as well. I think it's in Vanity Fair on this like prison soccer team in Sao Paulo that turned into a mini government about a decade ago. Just read Langeveche, guys. He's like an absolute boss.

One of the gangs we're going to get to was actually formed, I believe, during a soccer match or after a soccer match. It's one of the competitions for Red Command, but we'll get to that later. So William, still in prison in 1964 when Brazil's generals launched a coup against the leftist president, fearing communist infiltration in the government, you know, the usual Cold War back and forth. When the generals take over, they start imprisoning soldiers and trade unionists that were loyal to the ousted president.

Again, typical military dictatorship opening moves. At that time, William got close with some of the political prisoners who talked to him about oppression, about the struggle, all that sort of stuff.

But it didn't really take too much at that point, right? He soon gets released and decides to start robbing banks, graduating from his petty stick-ups and burglaries. Brazil's economy saw a boon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but the poor stayed poor, which is fertile ground for leftist rebel movements to rise. And these movements, they start fighting the government, similar to other places in Latin America at the time.

Lots of these groups rose up, different factions. I'm sure there were splinters and all that. You know how leftist movements like to do. People's Judean front, Judean's front for people, whatever it is. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, good reference. I've never seen Monty Python, but I don't know. Oh, come on. I was hopeful then. It's like British humor, man. I don't know, man. It doesn't really do it for me.

The most well-known is the revolutionary movement of October 8th, which is named for the day Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia. MRA, as they're known, they knew how to make a statement. They even kidnapped the US ambassador in 1969, though they weren't super effective in things like taking territory, actually controlling the ground, like say, Columbia's FARC.

But he had this kidnapping. They literally grabbed him off the street and then ferried him to the mountains in like the trunk of a car. The 1960s and 70s were like wild, even in America, you know. I know we talk about how wild things are right now, but they're wild in like an annoying way for the most part. But back then you had like Red Army faction in Germany and the Weathermen in the US and the Black Liberation Front, all these plane hijackings, Patty Hearst. It was just crazy.

But yeah, so they snatched up the ambassador. He got beaten a bit. I think there was actually some permanent damage done, but he was freed four days later in exchange for some political prisoners. Soon, the guerrillas were robbing banks just like William to fund their battle. William, meanwhile, he gets caught and the police assume he's a guerrilla. So the police hand him to the army who torture him with cattle prods and just beat the crap out of him, which is a common occurrence in Brazilian jails, political prisoner or not.

Jesus Christ. I'm going to say while we're on the subject of like crazy seventies, I think I'm going to do a red army faction episode soon. Like I spoke to a few of the old members here years ago. I should dig out their numbers again. One of them's like, and one of them's a neo-Nazi these days. So, uh,

That's a bit of a journey. That is a story right there, man. That's your horseshoe theory right there in one person. I mean, that's crazy. No, right? But yeah, they were fascinating. Really good movie about them that I liked. I forget what it was called. You know what I'm talking about? Is that the Baader-Meinhof Complex? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a sick film. It's a good, good movie. And yeah, things were just wild. And you know, you had these groups from like,

Germany that were training in like Beirut. He was just, yeah. What a time to be a journalist too. You know, no one was doing their own YouTube videos. You could just get out there and interview. I don't know, man, the glory days of chaos. So William and other prisoners also during this time, they're all, they're mixing with the political prisoners, you know, it's late 1970s and the foundation is being laid for red command to be born.

William had started a riot in another prison trying to escape, so he gets sent to the super maximum security one. This prison, like I said, it's an island. It's like Alcatraz. It's surrounded by jungle and sea, stiflingly hot. And William gets sent to like the worst area of it, along with 120 other prisoners, mostly criminals, but some leftist gorillas.

The government, again, decided they were going to throw those rebels, you know, the leftist middle class kids in with the hardcore prisoners expecting the poor bank robbers and murderers to just fuck with them, kill them, whatever. The leftists had wanted political prisoner status to avoid the more hardcore prisoners. And at first there's tension, right? The criminals were poor. They didn't give a shit about politics and they thought the rebels were elitist, overeducated, that sort of thing.

But these hardcore criminals like William, they took note of how the guerrillas stuck together and organized to ask for things or to protest against the guards, against jail rules, things like that. And they were like, you know, this looks like a good idea. And soon they all start mixing together and bonding. Instead of attacking each other, they all team up. And the leftists taught the real criminals revolutionary rhetoric.

And I kind of feel like this is the ultimate dream for every LARPing revolutionary on Twitter, you know, just like. Yeah, I mean, none of those guys got the bottle to do anything IRL. But yeah, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is like the dream. I mean, it's it's pretty crazy. And in Brazil, it actually happens. Right. They clung together. They develop communal responses to the prison. They challenge the guards. They're united.

You had the politics of the rebels mixing with the violence of the real criminals, the gangsters. And the Red Command was born in 1979 out of a few dozen inmates here. And it spread outward into the streets, into the favelas as the prisoners were released.

The prison wardens, they soon caught on to what was happening. They were, of course, not thrilled with the organizing. And they transferred a bunch of these guys to other prisons. You know, I think, I feel like similar stuff seems to always happen with prison gangs, right? Like they decide, oh, we're going to break these guys up and send them all over. And then it's like you just create other satellites. Right, yeah. But, you know, so they just kept spreading the gospel. And they started organizing to protect the prisoners from the guards and from other prison gangs everywhere they went.

So now the prisons are just going crazy, right? Even more so than before. Protests, uprisings, fighting with guards, fighting with other prisoner gangs who didn't like the new rules. And two of this new collectivist United Prisoners gangs, they get killed by a different prison gang. So...

And this new collectivist group, they kidnapped six of the other gang members and killed them. And a prison director coined the term Red Command for them because he just kind of needed to call them something. I guess red went with like the sort of Marxist leftist revolutionary rhetoric. Whatever it was, it stuck. And then the media picked it up and it kept growing. And suddenly they were everywhere.

That same year they were formed in 1979, Brazil was making progress towards a more democratic government and an amnesty was declared and all the political prisoners were freed. William was not, right? He was a bank robber, but he escaped in 1980. This country really needs to work on its prison system. Dude, even now, I mean, every couple of months there's massacres where literally 30 or 40 people are killed. That is insane. Yeah. That is insane. Yeah.

He starts robbing banks right when he gets out with his Red Command homies. They also start using new words and terms to describe what they were doing, liberating, expropriations, that sort of thing. They're political now, right? And this is actually something that I've kind of seen before, just a great phenomenon where criminals or militias sort of take up these service-level politics to put a romantic tick on their criminal actions. I interviewed this guy, a leader of the 18-ster gang in El Salvador.

You know, he started making, you know, these statements like they're a real group that's fighting for the poor. And it's like, no, you're extorting poor people and you're killing them. I understand the government is bad too, but like, I guess sometimes it's real, but sometimes it's complete nonsense. But people buy into the romanticism of it all because they really want to believe. And I've definitely seen it work with militant groups and reporters and

Maybe more so with internet arguing types, you know? What happened to you on Twitter this week? Dude, I'm just saying like the reality. I only tweet about now, you know, I don't even know, the NBA and- NFCs. And movies and yeah, and the crypto and NFT weird things I'm losing money on.

Anyway. Yeah, this also reminds me of this kind of making up new words. We did an episode on the Philippine drug war and there was all these crazy gangs that went around in the 80s chopping people's heads off and they said they were committing salvation and saving people for the Lord and shit. I mean, I guess you can say that, but if you're cutting people's heads off, it doesn't really kind of work with the message so well. Yeah, you can dress it up however you want. If you're murdering the people you're supposed to be helping, like, you know.

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It's hard to explain that away. Tough sell. I guess in this case, it wasn't all nonsense, right? Because they did spread the money around for everyone in the Red Command and some of the poor communities. William moved into Favela and he started giving robbery money for community projects. Red Command grew and they even made a pamphlet with their codes on being a quote, good bandit. And after a year out...

After a year out there, William, you know, he had too much heat. He was nabbed by the police. By now, he was kind of infamous. Though they say the Red Command doesn't have one founder or one leader, it's actually led by a roundtable of bosses.

In 1985, the Brazilian military dictatorship ends. And some of these guerrillas, the rebels, who were some of the ones that linked up with the Red Command, they kind of really split off from them so they can enter politics. I don't really know how this is done, to be honest. I guess it was like maybe the ones who had always been more political are like, okay, that's enough of that. I'm a politician now. Red Command, though, doesn't slow down. And now that the more politically minded are gone, it's time to refocus.

And you can kind of guess what they got into. So another thing that happens in the 1980s, banks get harder to rob and drugs get way more profitable. Cue the instrumental from like white lines or push it to the limit, whatever you want. So like many a revolutionary, but kind of not really group beforehand, Red Command moves into the cocaine business and business is booming.

Rio is a major port city and the Colombians were moving weight through there. So the Red Command starts as protection, then moving to a bit of the trafficking and majorly into street sales. Though one on the trafficking, I've seen some experts dispute that they're really big in trafficking, despite having a presence in some other countries, though it said that they're moving more into it now. I'm yeah, I'm struggling to see the revolution at this point as well. Yeah, I guess it was a revolution in in getting cheap cocaine and drugs. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I mean, gangs that protect drug shipments like that are often paid in product. It's easier for the cartels and it can be more profitable for the gang if they can flip it easily. And of course, Brazil has no shortage of nightlife or party culture. And the coke there is quite cheap because it doesn't have to cross a lot of borders. You know, it doesn't have to go many miles away and face lots of law enforcement or get stepped on as it goes from supplier to wholesale to smaller wholesale and so on. Cheap coke and great all-night nightlife, you know, which comes first?

This becomes the major moneymaker and the main focus of the Red Command now, selling Coke and also crack. And Brazil now actually has the most crack users in the world. Also, do these drug guys, they just come through the Amazon overland? And they just like sail down the Amazon River? It's a little bit through the Amazon in like, I think, I guess the north of the country. And there's others through the south of the country. So there's a couple of different routes that people go through. Yeah.

And you can kind of see how the system is put in place like any other sort of massive drug dealing gang that controls territory. They call the stalls, the little storefronts, bocas.

You get the young lookouts, the older soldiers, the bosses of those areas, the plazas that they call it in Mexico, and then the kingpins. And they control the favelas. They basically regulate everything. They run everything. They are the law. They're a state within a state, similar to MS-13 or 18th Street. If you've listened to that episode that we did, if you haven't, go back and listen to it. It's fantastic. I've seen estimates that over a million people in Rio and the favelas live in essentially gang-controlled territory where the state is absent.

And this is more from John Lee Anderson's article, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote

Favela chiefs are gerentes, I'm going to mispronounce all the Portuguese. I think it's like ger, ger, ger in Portuguese. I don't know. You guys will be okay. You'll deal with it. Or general managers. Their deputies are sub-gerentes, gerentes, whatever. The top gang bosses are donos or owners. And to stay in charge, of course, you need guns. Like big guns, lots of guns. So,

They started off buying guns in other South American countries, usually stolen from their armies. There's also a pipeline from the U.S., and they even start working with the FARC, trading some of their guns for cocaine. Anderson adds, Rio's gangsters have been caught with military-issue machine guns and anti-aircraft weapons. Semi-automatic assault rifles and hand grenades are commonplace.

There's a story that goes around a lot that you often hear whenever there's a documentary made about them or an article, which is that one of these gangs shot down a police helicopter, I think, in 2009. Holy shit. Yeah. So that makes the rounds a lot to sort of convey how heavily armed they are. The Red Command continued to grow in the 90s with cocaine profits. But as money and coke do, they caused fracturing, infighting, and same-team killing. The usual breakaways happened, other gangs formed.

One big one was the Third Command, and this happened in the 1990s. They're pretty similar, except part of their whole shtick is refusing to sell crack. Okay, that's nice. Going back to the community roots. Yeah, good guys. Yeah, I mean, you gotta, I guess, respect that on some level. It's that bandit's moral code or whatever it was. It's a good shtick. Still, you know, they also operate in favelas. They sold and trafficked cocaine. Another breakaway was called the Friends of Friends or Amigos de Amigos, which is just a great name for a cartel or gang or even a production company, you know?

That group started in 1998 when a high-level Red Command guy got kicked out for ordering the murder of another member without the right permissions. You also had these police militias forming to fight all these gangs, usually made up of retired cops, some active cops, and others who hated the gangs. And they function a bit like death squads. I mean, for all intents and purposes, they kind of are death squads. And sort of like always the case when it comes to these groups –

these whatever auto defenses you want to call them, they soon start to operate like gangs themselves, right? When they clear out the gangs, they set up their own extortion rackets and things like that. They're essentially paramilitary squads and have been linked to high-level officials, including Bolsonaro. And these militias actually control a fair bit of territory too. Here's a quote from a recent article from The Economist. Prosecutors say that from the mid-1990s, these groups, often made up of rogue police officers, were

started snatching swampy federal land. They filled it with dirt and sold a lot to families, mostly poor migrants from other states. In Sal Bento, a neighborhood in the city, a hill overlooks thousands of identical tin roof shacks. The militias control all of it, says an activist. For a fee, they provide transport, water, cooking gas, cable television, and internet. But they also flaunt heavy weapons, run extortion rackets, and threaten to kill anyone who opposes them. You know, on this level, it's just like,

It's just they're not even like a gang anymore almost, right? They are a state within a state. That's why it's kind of hard to classify them. Yeah, they traffic cocaine. They sell cocaine. But they're a militia. They're like a non-state actor in that way. It's –

I don't know. It's kind of – Yeah, it's just like the government has just completely lost control of the whole thing. Yeah, there's no government. Yeah, and it's kind of like in El Salvador where people are so sick of the gangs sometimes that they do have some measure of support, and they're seen by some as the lesser of two evils. Of course, some people see them as worse than the drug gangs.

I mean, if the government's like a hangover of all this colonial racist stuff and it's not really catering to the people, I can see why wouldn't anyone... I mean, if you have to live in a favela, which is by definition an irregular city because the government can't give you any homes, I mean, I'd be tempted to follow the gangs. I could see how all of these things start.

Yeah, I don't know, man. I feel like that's a false dichotomy. Like the gangs themselves are pretty vicious as well. A lot of people, like I can't speak from experience from Brazil, but in El Salvador, like, you know, people, people are cheering some of the death squads that are coming out there and killing the gang members. You know, they are tired of living under their thumb. They would much rather have the government in charge. Again,

Again, this is not a uniform thing, right? Some people are tired of police and military coming to their neighborhoods and roughing up any young man that they think is in a gang. But it's a lot less black and white than it seems. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, when I've been in Manila following the Philippine stuff as well, Duterte's approval rate is through the roof. I mean, he's never been more popular. Most people were just totally fed up with the drug crime and...

you know, for better or worse, support all of the police coming through and rattling through all of these neighborhoods in the city. Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, it's tough, right? Because I think the natural inclination when you're there doing these sort of stories is to, you know,

want to lecture people about like well you know you're violating the the human rights of these gang members and the gangs in general and all that and they're just like like we have to live under it you don't you know and they'll it's kind of like uh it kind of flips things on there and again this isn't me condoning obviously extrajudicial killings or paramilitary stuff or i'm just trying to say that like for the people who actually live under these systems um

It's not as black and white as it is for us, you know, looking at it from the outside. It's complicated. It's rough. I would never excuse extrajudicial killings. But for some of the people living under this stuff, you know, they kind of see that as their only option. If someone's extorting you, you know, killed your father in front of you and all that, like what's going to happen? That's why you create this vicious cycle.

between people joining these death squad-like groups, and it just goes on and on and on. Anyway, here's another quote from The Economist. They initially began as extortion rackets, but have since moved into drugs and arms trafficking, and ostensibly legal avenues such as construction and transportation, which can be used to launder criminal proceeds. Crucially, the groups, commonly associated with Rio's West Zone, also control entry and exit to the areas they control.

The militias are not a parallel power. They are not groups that operate in the absence of a state. The militia is the state, says Jose Souza of the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who has studied the militias over two decades. In the favelas, some locals quietly suggest a preference for the drug gangs over militias because at least the traffickers are not engaged in systematic extortion. So there you go. There are definitely some who prefer the drug gangs over these militias. It's just not uniform anywhere.

And of course, in Brazil, too, you have the regular police who aren't shy about shooting first and killing as well. Rio and Brazil, it's become the site of all these groups fighting each other for territory and fighting the police as well. And the police there are super heavily equipped and they fight legit battles versus these guys. I mean, real heavy-duty weapons. It's a war. It's not just a couple of shots being fired here and there.

We're talking like hours and hours long shootouts. 2014 saw 306 police officers shot in Rio. 87 died. That's insane. Like in one city in one year, that is a fucking bonkers number.

Completely nuts. In 2018, the number of people officially killed by the police reached a five-year high last year, rising to 6,220, an average of 17 people each day. That's for all of Brazil. But also, that is wild. Those are insane numbers.

That is mental. I like those. I think those numbers are higher than in the Philippines as well, which is like when you think about the amount of press that the Philippine drug war gets, like this is unbelievable numbers. This is like an active war zone. Yeah, it's it's a.

It's crazy, man. The main rival of Red Command now is the PCC or First Command of the Capitol, which like, I mean, come on, guys, like come up with some more original names. You know, you could First Command, Third Command, Red Command. It's just hard to keep track for me. The PCC is a Sao Paulo gang. That's the city in Brazil that is the economic backbone. I think it's home to like 20 million people in the metro area with big, massive favelas.

The PCC actually came out of a prison riot in 1992 where 111 inmates were killed, most if not all by police. These are the guys in that Langevita piece. Yeah, these are the fucking crazy ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In 1993, a group of inmates in a nearby prison decided to form their own group and it gave birth to the PCC. Their whole thing was they basically wanted to overthrow the penitentiary system.

but the pcc basically tries to be like the red command as well they have a similar slogan and those same points in a pamphlet you know the bandit code or whatever and their motto is like the red command liberty justice and peace i like the idea of these kids with ak's and flip-flops going around flying from for the gang like charity muggers or something yeah like also why do they need to overthrow the penitentiary system like it's working pretty well for them

I guess it's just a brutal place, you know, it's just not a place you want to end up. I haven't seen, I mean, I don't really watch it. What's the show, Imprisoned Abroad? Oh yeah, Banged Up Abroad. You ever watch that? Yeah. Yeah, I haven't watched the, if there was any Brazil ones. I'm sure there is one and it's incredible. Yeah, yeah. They dominate the favelas in Sao Paulo, but they aren't as openly active as the Red Command.

They've also expanded into other nearby countries. You know, there's some wild boys too. They attack police, prisons, judges. In 2006, they attacked police stations all over Sao Paulo in this surprise attack. They attacked government offices, shopping malls, businesses. They burned buses while 70 prisons in the state rioted as well. It was a full-fledged attack on the state, shut the city down. And then a few days later, on like a Monday morning, all the attacks, the whole thing just stops.

Dozens of police and civilians were killed, but it's just this power move showing the government how quickly they can turn it on and turn it off if they get fucked with too much, especially when it comes to making things harder on the leadership in jail. The same situations, again, have occurred in El Salvador with the gangs and leadership in jail, though they can't take on the state head on like they can in Brazil.

Afterward, after that attack, police officers went on a rampage. They say they killed 120 criminals in eight days, but human rights groups have said around 500 people were killed and many were just civilians. In 2012, the PCC launched a similar grouping of attacks, this time spread out over months and only stopped when a top law enforcement official resigned. And they must have really, really not liked that guy.

I mean, also, like, why is this not all over the news all the time? These, I can't get over these numbers, man. These are just insane casualties for, like, a country that's not actively being bombed to shit by ISIS.

Yeah, I think Mexico might be considered per capita these days, the murder capita. I don't know if it's per capita because you have small countries like El Salvador and Honduras that are up there. But when it comes to, I think, massive amounts of murder, it's Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico. And I think Brazil might be up there. Again, it has that huge population, but still, it's crazy. Here's an interview that was posted with an expert on inside crime.

But PCC members brought an ideology, an idea of unity and a transformation started. They started to tell traffickers the same thing that they told prisoners. We are not going to fight. We are going to talk. We are going to make decisions together. We are going to get organized. When the PCC reaches a new neighborhood, it starts to organize the criminal economy. So they seem, I mean, they seem pretty sharp. They initially had an alliance with Red Command, but that ended in 2016. And

And now they've kind of fought, you know, wars, especially in Rio. But now they're the most powerful and biggest gang in Brazil. And like I said, they've expanded into nearby countries as well. But yeah, these gangs, it's almost like they function like, you know, non-political militias as opposed to gangs. They literally fulfill the role of the state in many of these favelas. And it's interesting how these guys really aren't big time, you know, international traffickers that so much of their money enough to employ tens of thousands of members and keep them in heavy weapons.

enough heavy weaponry to fight the police and the military come from just importing and street sales. Brazilians do a lot of cocaine. I think it's somewhere like second or third up there with the UK and the US for most per capita usage. And it seems like these guys are going to rub up against like the regional, like big regional players, right? Surely they're going to start

Coming to source, getting involved in Colombia. I don't know. It just seems like they're really spreading quick. I think they're starting to get involved with trafficking into Europe. But again, you know, these are all sort of newish developments. In the mid-2010s, these gangs started getting a lot of international news headlines as Rio tried to prepare the city for the World Cup and Summer Olympics. The city launched a pacification program known as the UPP in an attempt to clean up the favelas. They actually started, I think, in like 2008, but it started real slow and only with some of the safer, smaller favelas.

Basically, the police would announce their intention to invade a fellow neighborhood, move in with overwhelming force, and then set up shop and not leave. So the gang members couldn't just hide for a few days and then come back. In those neighborhoods, gang violence has gone down, but of course, police violence has gone up. But it's kind of like that arcade game, you know, with the groundhogs where they pop up out of their holes and you're going to... You're going to remember this one day. It's Whack-A-Mole, right? Whack-A-Mole. Dude, I make that reference like every other episode. I still can't get it.

The program, so the program, usually controversial, lots of accusations of extrajudicial killings and overaggressive police violence, or that it was just for propaganda purposes. 2014 is when things really ramped up and the gangs actually started to fight back hardcore. The police were also sometimes backed up by the military. And in 2018, the military was ordered to take over some fellas like on their own.

And those crazy prison war massacres, they're still happening. Gang on gang, police on gang and all that. In July of 2019, another gang, Class A Command, which is an ally of the PCC, fought the Red Command in Altamira Prison. 62 people died and a dozen or so were beheaded. Some of the inmates allegedly played soccer with the heads. That's the beautiful game, guys. Yeah, I mean, they're Brazilian, so it must have been a really exciting match.

They play the sport differently than the Europeans. You know, this battle just rages on. It's funny, in the course of the research I was doing, I read an article from the LA Times in 1989 that kind of said, you know, the government's finally doing something. The Red Command is on its last legs, but...

Definitely not the case. In 2020, the gangs actually got some good press for installing coronavirus curfews. And a recent Financial Times piece talked about how the country is reeling from recessions and pandemic shutdowns, and 60% of the city is now controlled by the militias, which maybe we should do an episode solely on these police militias because I think someone requested that. It's just wild.

I think Brazil is like the worst coronavirus place in the world, right, as well. It's completely screwed up. Yeah, it's getting real bad. This is a quote, too, from that same article. Their influence over an estimated 2 million residents has become so pronounced that even the authorities have begun to acknowledge that parts of the state are no longer in their control.

Should be said as well, though, that 2020 saw the murder rate in Rio fall to 3,500 from 5,300 in 2017. So there's been some improvement on the violence. Meanwhile, like I said, the gangs started fancying themselves international narco traffickers and have really expanded into shipping coke into Europe. According to a 2020 Reuters report,

in Belgium is now the top port for cocaine coming into Europe, which I really thought it was Spain. Yeah, it's like, it's Rotterdam and Antwerp are the two biggies in Europe. By the way, shout out to Antwerp train station. It's amazing. And if anyone's going to go into railing around Europe, go there because it's cool. I actually thought, you know, I assumed it was Spain because you had a lot of cocaine flowing in from West Africa and that Spanish coast is pretty wide open and known for the corruption. So I'm,

Yeah, I think it comes in through North Africa, right? It's like Moroccan hash and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so the Northern European thing kind of threw me off. And this is a quote from the same article. Five years ago, Brazil did not rank among the major embarkation points for cargo ships caught bringing cocaine into Spain. The top five slots belong to Colombia, Venezuela, Portugal, Ecuador, and Chile, according to data provided last year by Spanish Customs.

Brazil vaulted to the number one spot in 2016 and again in 2018 when law enforcement seized a record 4.3 tons from ships arriving from Brazilian ports, the figures show. The PCC is actually leading the narco-trafficking out of Brazil.

It's going out of the major port in Sao Paulo and it comes in through Paraguay and from Bolivia. Paraguay law enforcement is just completely overwhelmed at the moment. It also comes in from the north through the Amazon, though that's mostly controlled by the family of the north, the FDN. So does the Red Command actually have any kind of political message these days or is it just hauling coke all over the place and murdering people? I

I mean, I'm sure there are messages about police violence and marginalization of these communities and the government not doing enough, but I think their main focus is murdering people in cocaine. Uh-huh. Okay. After reaching Europe, the merchandise is distributed across the continent by Eastern European, Moroccan, and Italian mobsters partnered with the PCC, officials have said. I mean, it kind of sounds like an underworld t-shirt right there. Yeah.

I mean, we've got plenty on the site. People can go there and check it out. Yeah. So it's interesting to see them moving into the international thing because there is a lot more money in that. Even though it seems like street level, you know, it's kind of like the Camorra. They have all that street level cocaine dealing they're doing in Naples, but they also focus on the international trafficking as well. It's sort of like a...

Business on both ends. They're really looking to expand. So yeah, that is the story of the Red Command in Brazil. It's not all fun parties and bylay funks and generating community spirit. There's terrorizing these communities as well, beheadings, chopping up bodies. There's really nothing romantic about it.

So yeah, that is our episode on the Red Commands. I want to thank some of those sponsors that have hit our higher tiers. Peter Corliss, Morgan Love, Chris Cusimano, Jared Levy, Jeremy Rich, Ronald, Josh, Lisa. I think that is...

That is all I got. Sean, anything you want to add? Yeah, I just want to like tee up. I mean, I want to say thanks to those guys too. Like you're really, really helping us make this thing, you know, rattle along and we're really having a lot of fun doing it. But I want to tee up a couple of interviews we've got for bonus shows. This week I'm going to be speaking to Sally Hayden. She's like an amazing journalist. I think she's based in Sierra Leone at the moment and she's going to talk about

trafficking cartels kind of organized crime in Africa it's going to be a really really interesting show and then later this week which is our next going to be our next regular episode I've got Patrick Radden Keefe on the show who's a bit of a hero of mine and he's going to be talking about a book of his called the snakehead which came out years ago and it's about I mean if people wonder who the woman is on our logo that is her she's like this no

notorious human trafficker was shipping Chinese people into New York for years and years. And she's got a really interesting story and he wrote the book on it. So that is going to be cool.

That was when that boat crashed and people just started showing up on the shores of Rockaway, right? Something along those lines? Yeah. Yeah, that's a crazy. That's it. I was pretty young when that happened, but it's pretty crazy. But yeah, thank you guys, as always, for supporting us. Patreon.com slash TheUnderworldPodcast. Tell your friends, all that, and give us money and take care.