How a Brazilian prison gang became an international criminal leviathan
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/11/pcc-brazil-drug-trade-gang
But over the past five years, investigators say the PCC – which the US now calls one of the world’s most powerful organized crime groups – has morphed into an even more formidable force after forging lucrative alliances with partners ranging from Bolivian cocaine producers to Italian mafiosi. Today, the group boasts tens of thousands of members and has a growing portfolio of interests, including illegal goldmines in the Amazon. It controls one of South America’s most important trafficking routes – linking Bolivia and Brazil to Europe and Africa – and is partly responsible for a tsunami of cocaine that has brought car bombings, assassinations and gunfights to parts of Europe.
“If someone is using cocaine in France, England or Spain there’s a very good chance it got there through the hands of the PCC,” said Lincoln Gakiya, a prosecutor from São Paulo’s organized crime taskforce, Gaeco, who estimates the group now makes $1bn a year – almost entirely from international trafficking.
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“They start in this nightmarish situation and they gather up enough power to subdue all rivals. They become a kind of a leviathan and they take over and then they put in place a kind of social order, a peace, that makes everybody better off.
“Of course, some people don’t like it,” Lessing added. “But for the average prisoner they are happy to be governed, just like the average citizen is happy that there is a state.”
