Behind Rio’s deadly raid: Brazil’s billion-dollar criminal networks
- - Behind Rio’s deadly raid: Brazil’s billion-dollar criminal networks
Alessandra Freitas, CNNNovember 9, 2025 at 10:27 PM
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Militariy police officers patrol during "Operation Containment" in Rio de Janeiro's Complexo da Penha on October 28. - Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images
Armored vehicles rumbling through narrow alleys. Rifle shots cracking in heavy crossfire. Helicopters and weaponized drones firing from above. Soldiers in military gear engaged in violent combat. Bodies scattered on blood-slicked streets.
These could be scenes from a war zone. But on October 28, they unfolded not on a desolate battlefield but on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro — a postcard city better known for its breathtaking coastline and lively bossa nova music scene.
“Operation Containment” brought 2,500 police officers, soldiers and snipers up the slopes of Rio’s Complexo da Penha and Complexo do Alemão favelas, home to roughly 110,000 people.
A man stands next to cars burnt during a barricade in Rio's Complexo da Penha on October 28. - Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images
Their target was the Comando Vermelho (CV), or Red Command, a criminal organization that has ruled these hillside shantytowns for decades. During the operation, at least 117 suspected gunmen and four police officers were killed, and about 100 people were arrested. Authorities said they seized 118 weapons, including 91 rifles and 14 explosive devices, as well as a ton of drugs.
The raid followed a year-long investigation into the Red Command and was triggered in part by the gang’s expansion into new territories, a recent surge in violence and an effort by authorities to reassert state control.
Officials called the raid a success. But with at least 121 dead, and early reports putting the toll at 132, the operation drew sharp criticism from local and international human rights groups. It also laid bare a deep divide over how to confront Brazil’s entrenched organized crime syndicates.
Life in a crossfire
“It’s not the first time we see blood being spilled for a ‘greater good,’” said Thainã de Medeiros, who lived in Complexo da Penha for 35 years. “But this ‘good’ never comes.”
Now a community organizer and member of an anti-violence collective who works in the favela, Medeiros is no stranger to how the Red Command instills fear in its territories. “You walk around and see people carrying big rifles on every corner, standing by your door with grenades and pistols,” he said. “No one feels safe. And there is always the risk of instability — of another operation like this.”
A drone view of Complexa da Penha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 4. - Jorge Silva/Reuters
The gangs also “determine who gets in and operates inside the communities,” said 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 control in the favelas has made it increasingly difficult for government officials and police to access these areas.
“The state abandons these communities, and then gangs end up gaining even more control,” Alcadipani said.
Brazil’s criminal organizations have also extended their reach from the illegal economy to politics through such means as vote-buying, violence, intimidation and the funding of political candidates, as studies and police investigations have found, helping them to become one of the most powerful gangs in South America.
‘A necessary operation’
Luiz Lima, a right-leaning congressman representing Rio, defended the October 28 raid as unavoidable.
“It was a necessary operation,” Lima told CNN. “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 said.
Lima insisted that the public backs a tougher stance and that the vast majority of favela residents supported the operation.
Members of the military police special unit detain suspected drug dealers during the operation in Complexa da Penha on October 28. - Aline Massuca/Reuters
Mourners react as people gather around bodies October 29, the day after a deadly police operation against drug trafficking in Complexa da Penha. - Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
“The people living there are extorted,” he said. “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 result, Fichino said, is “a perpetual cycle of war that reinforces the very criminal structures it claims to dismantle.”
The debate over lasting solutions reveals the complexity of how criminal organizations have grown so powerful, weaving themselves into nearly every layer of Brazilian society over time.
A faction born from dictatorship
The Red Command was founded in 1979 inside an island prison off the coast of Rio, the Cândido Mendes Penitentiary, where common criminals were locked up alongside leftist political prisoners opposed to the Brazilian military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. In the harsh conditions there, what began as an informal alliance for protection soon became an organized network.
One of its founders, William da Silva Lima, spent more than 30 years behind bars after being convicted of armed robbery, extortion and kidnapping. In prison, he became a spokesman for other inmates and negotiated with authorities.
The deplorable conditions inside the nineteenth-century Cândido Mendes — long known among inmates as the “Cauldron of Hell” — pushed prisoners to organize in resistance, da Silva Lima wrote in his 2010 book, recounting the origin of the Red Command and his part in creating the Brazilian organized crime group.
When political prisoners were released in 1979, da Silva Lima wrote, members of what was then called the Falange Vermelha or Red Phalanx, began orchestrating mass prison breaks and investing in the burgeoning cocaine trade.
By 1985, the Red Command controlled roughly 70% of all drug-selling points in Rio — and the city’s deadly turf wars with other factions began.
According to Márcio Sérgio Christino, a São Paulo state criminal prosecutor and author of a book on the gangs, while the Red Command is Brazil’s oldest faction, it is not the biggest — although its recent expansion shows it aims to achieve that goal. Its main obstacle is not the police or the government, he said, but a competing faction: bigger, better organized and highly influential in South America.
Brazil’s biggest underground empire: The PCC
Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), or First Capital Command, is a criminal organization created in 1993 that also has its genesis in a prison — the Taubaté Penitentiary in São Paulo. Its founders were survivors of the Carandiru massacre the year before, when 111 inmates were killed by military police.
It wasn’t until February 2001 that the group revealed its full reach. In what became known as the “big rebellion,” PCC members coordinated uprisings in 29 prisons simultaneously. About 27,000 inmates were involved, leaving at least 16 killed and 77 injured, among those incarcerated and police officers. At the end of the 27-hour uprising, the flag of the PCC — black and white, some accompanied by handmade signs reading “peace and justice” — was raised across São Paulo’s penitentiaries. The message was clear: the state had lost control.
Brazilian mounted police stand guard outside Carandiru Prision in Sāo Paulo, Brazil, on February 18, 2001, after rioting prisoners took guards and visitors hostage in a revolt that spread to other prisons across the region. - Dado Galdieri/AP
“At first, their focus was … controlling the prison environment,” Christino explained. “Then they began to grow, to organize, and one of their main pillars became the drug trade.”
To obtain a higher-quality supply of cocaine, the PCC expanded into Brazil’s border states with Bolivia and Paraguay — two of South America’s main cocaine sources. With the US market already dominated by Mexico and Colombia, cocaine producers in landlocked Bolivia focused on reaching Europe, and a deal was struck.
“Bolivia agreed to sell only to the PCC,” Christino said. “In return, the PCC handled transport, logistics and sales — to Europe, Africa, and beyond.”
From friends to rivals
Until then, the Red Command and PCC were not enemies. But their fragile coexistence collapsed once the Red Command, blocked from Bolivia, turned to Peru and built a cocaine trade that operates almost entirely within Brazil. Notably, the gang came to dominate supply routes through the northern part of the country, using the major rivers and their tributaries of the Amazon region.
Competition over these routes ignited a series of prison riots and massacres across northern Brazil, Christino said.
“If you look at those uprisings — dozens, sometimes hundreds of deaths, even cannibalism — that was all about the routes,” he said. “It was a territorial war.”
Relatives wait for information following a riot that ended with at least four prisoners killed inside Desembargador Raimundo Vidal Pessoa Public Jail in Manaus, in Brazil's Amazonas state, on January 8, 2017. Deadly prison riots intensified in Brazil since a truce broke down between the country's two largest drug gangs, the First Capital Command (PCC) and the Red Command (CV). - Raphael Alves/AFP/Getty Images
The syndicates now clash for control of Brazil’s highways, rivers and prisons as they branch out into other criminal realms.
A 2025 study by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security found that gangs such as the Red Command and PCC generated 146.8 billion Brazilian reais ($27 billion) in 2022 through the illegal trade of gold, fuel, alcohol and cigarettes — nearly 10 times more than from cocaine trafficking, which was estimated at 15 billion reais ($2.8 billion).
They also engage in money laundering and invest in construction firms, transport companies, fuel distributors and even crypto markets to wash billions of reals in illicit profits.
Inside the command centers: An ongoing battle
Investigations by the Public Ministry of Rio de Janeiro show that gang leaders continue to issue orders from behind bars — through coded messages, letters and encrypted apps.
While high-risk inmates have been isolated in individual cells, the flow of information never truly stops, said Christino. “There’s no such thing as absolute isolation,” he said. “Cellphones still get in, and when they don’t, messages travel through lawyers or visitors. There’s always a way.”
In a statement to CNN, the Federal District’s Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration said that “intelligence units operate in close coordination with other security forces and the judiciary to monitor faction-linked inmates.” They work to determine an inmate’s position in the hierarchy and isolate leaders “to prevent them from issuing orders,” the secretariat said.
Despite these measures, investigators acknowledge that Brazil’s penitentiaries remain the backbone of command and communication for its largest criminal organizations — a paradox that the state struggles to contain.
“The state’s militarized response only strengthens the factions,” Alcadipani said. “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 help favela youth enter the job market, said Medeiros, the community organizer. Career fairs were scheduled for the day after the deadly operation in the Rio favelas. “We had to cancel everything,” he told CNN.
“Honestly, I thought today I’d be finalizing the details for that beautiful day,” he said. “Instead, we were cleaning bodies from the streets. And now, we’re bracing for what’s next.”
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