Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  The torture and murder campaign damaged Brazilian guerilla groups but didn’t destroy them. Militants kept launching attacks that would kill close to a hundred police officers, soldiers, and civilians. To finance these strikes, the guerrillas turned, like the ghetto criminals, to robbing banks. Financial institutions in Rio were hammered from all sides.

  During the height of the insurgency, William was caught holding up a Rio bank branch and officers suspected him (mistakenly) of being a guerrilla operative. Police handed him over to an army base where for four days he suffered electric shocks and beatings while his interrogators demanded to know which cell of guerrillas he belonged to. They also gave him truth drugs, but he would hold them under his tongue and spit them out. In the end, when he was hanging up by his arms and legs, battered and bruised, he yelled, “I belong to the organization of joint smokers!”

  The memory of telling his interrogators this line causes him to smile particularly wide now—but I don’t know what kind of pain it gave him back then.

  “What about the Red Commando?” I ask William for about the fifth time. He raises his hand. “I am just getting to that.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The name Red Commando first appears in government reports and newspaper stories in 1979. William confirms it was baptized that year, but says the organization was brewing for about five years before, as political prisoners mixed with criminals in this turbulent period. He sees it as a natural, organic thing. “I didn’t found the Red Commando,” he says. “It was born. It was born of oppression.”1

  Political prisoners forged links with inmates in various jails. But the biggest fusion was made on the Ilha Grande prison island, Brazil’s own Alcatraz. William was sent there after he led a prison riot.

  Following his arrest for bank robbery, William was held in the Helio Gomes transit jail where he waited for a prison placement. As a holding pen, Helio Gomes was especially violent, inmates stuffed together, seasoned killers alongside green teenagers. William saw men cut up and raped in front of him. He was determined to escape.

  He plotted his jailbreak with a dozen cohorts. They smuggled in a saw, chisel, and hammer and dug a hole from their cell to a corridor. Their plan was to climb out the tunnel when guards changed shifts, overpower them, dress in their uniforms, and head over the roof.

  When he describes this to me, it sounds like such a harebrained scheme I wonder how they dreamed it could succeed. But it got quite far. They made it through their tunnel right as guards were switching shifts and took nine hostages. And they succeeded in disguising themselves in the uniforms and getting through the cellblock. But then it (predictably) fell apart.

  “A guard recognized us, so we had to set him on fire with gasoline. We got to the roof and police snipers were shooting us, so we used our hostages to make a shield. Luckily the story of the riot got out on the radio. Otherwise the police would have killed us all.”

  They nearly killed them anyway. Hundreds of officers surrounded the rioters and moved in with gunshots and blows. William was shot in the hand and beaten, and spent a month in hospital before they shipped him to Ilha Grande.

  Like on all prison islands, natural defenses stop inmates from escaping Ilha Grande. It sits in seething heat, surrounded by rough sea and covered by inhospitable jungle. But the most vicious animals were in the gray cellblocks and dirt yards—convicted killers and the guards keeping them in line.

  When William arrived on the island with others from the Helio Gomes jailbreak, angry officers forced them to walk a gauntlet while they took revenge blows. They beat one prisoner so badly he needed artificial resuscitation.

  They named William as a ringleader and sent him to a wing of a 120 prisoners, considered among the most dangerous in Brazil. Ninety were common criminals and thirty were leftist guerillas. The inmates called this wing “The Pit.”

  Looking back, it’s easy to see the foolish mistake of sticking desperado bank robbers like William in a pen with leftist guerrillas. But it’s easy to judge with hindsight. In the rocky days of the seventies it was hard to imagine this motley crew of convicts would create a movement that would cause Brazil problems three decades later. And pressure came from high up not to recognize the status of political prisoners.

  The fusion of prisoners was not straightforward either. It might sound like a joyous moment of cross-class solidarity. But there was friction between the university-educated children of middle-class Brazilians and robbers from the villages and favelas.

  “The political prisoners fought to differentiate themselves from the rest of the inmates, an attitude that we considered to be elitist,” William writes. “In our eyes, their desire to single themselves out from the other detainees was an expression of the hegemony of the middle class.”2

  But in response to a brutal prison regime, the alliance gradually solidified. Guards entered the Pit during day or night to beat prisoners. They were trying to crush their resistance by keeping them on edge. To defend themselves, the prisoners invented a technique of bunching together with whoever was being beaten, creating a scrum to shield them.

  As William recounts this moment, his face looks intensely happy. It was a defining moment for him. After years of suffering hidings from police, soldiers, and prison guards, he witnessed a way to stop it, through solidarity. I am reminded of the Italian peasant cooperatives that declared that while one twig can be broken, a bundle of twigs will stand firm. (Italian fascists later stole the concept.)

  As they drew together, the Pit prisoners created rules for their wing. The first challenge was to ban fighting and murder among themselves. Any grudges had to be settled on the outside. Rape was forbidden. Theft was forbidden.

  Influenced by the political prisoners, they shared and rationed food. While authorities provided basic provisions, prisoners relied on what relatives sent from the mainland. Dividing it up, William found, they could eat better more often. (Like the parable of the feeding of the five thousand.)

  The Pit prisoners then found a surprising chance to challenge guards legally. Two inmates working on the outside perimeter made a dash to the bushes to try and escape. The guards dragged them back and beat them to death.

  The murder was in full sight of the prisoners, but it was outside their bars, so they were powerless to help the victims. However, the political prisoners prepared a legal complaint and everyone in the Pit signed on as witnesses. William was amazed that several warders were punished. He saw their movement could challenge the system.

  Prison authorities also recognized this threat of politicized criminals. To try and diffuse it, they moved the leaders to other jails, transferring William to mainland Rio State in 1976. But rather than stopping the newfound organization, they spread it.

  Inmates in Rio’s prisons were just waiting to be organized, William says. With tens of thousands of convicts crowded into shit-infested, decaying buildings, brutality had got out of control. William points to a young father inside for marijuana who was being repeatedly raped. In another case, he saw a man murdered over a piece of bread. They needed structure to stop them from behaving like animals. William and other Pit veterans got prisoners to accept rules that put a basic order in their lives and offered the weak a defense against predators.

  This is a driving force behind prison gangs in Latin America. Inmates organize to survive. This includes arranging basic things such as sleeping spaces. In some prisons, they even have to share space for conjugal visits. Without rules, they face the threat of their spouses being raped.

  But guards saw prisoners organizing as a menace and tried to break them up. William and a friend called Nelson Nogueira dos Santos led prisoners to scrum together against beatings as they had on the island. The guards took Nelson to another cell and battered him. Nelson started a hunger strike and William and the others followed suit.

  A hunger strike was an interesting technique for inmates to choose. The criminals were increasingly following the global tactics of political prisoners from that
era. However, the guards refused to budge, and Nelson died of starvation after forty-eight days. The rest abandoned the effort. The hunger strike was broken, but it echoed through the prison system.

  In one jail, twelve prisoners took the director hostage and demanded safe passage to Mexico. Police stormed in and shot all the inmates dead, along with the director himself. In another case, one of William’s friends tried to escape and was surrounded by guards. He managed to stab an officer to death before they slew him. “He made it one all, instead of one nil,” William says, comparing the double killing to a soccer score.

  The deaths alarmed prison wardens, so they reversed course and moved the leaders, including William, back to Ilha Grande. They figured it was better to have the disease concentrated in the Pit. But it was hard to contain it even there. Other inmates on the island began following the Pit prisoners. The organization spread into the general population.

  Not all the prisoners liked the new rules. A gang of robbers butted up against the political upstarts and murdered two of the Pit prisoners. The Pit prisoners responded by capturing six members of the gang. They judged them and found them guilty. And they bludgeoned and stabbed them to death.

  Murdering six men is a savage act. But Pit prisoners saw it as a fight for survival and the only way to shield themselves from more attacks. It is striking they “judged” the prisoners, one of the first “trials” of the commando’s alternative justice system, which would spread through prison wings and ghettos.

  “The repercussions were huge throughout the entire penal system,” William writes. “In a short time the code of the old Pit was extended to all prisons: death to anyone who attacked or raped a comrade.”3

  When the prison director wrote up his report on the “executions,” he needed to give the Pit prisoners a name. He wanted to show his superiors there was a conspiracy. It’s also simply hard to describe these actions without a name. Thus he called them the “Red Commando” in his report. Ironically, it was a prison director who baptized them.

  Authorities giving criminal groups names that stick is common. It’s likely Mexico’s notorious Guadalajara Cartel was named by DEA agents in their dispatches to Washington. Again they needed to give the conspiracy a name and wanted to grab attention.

  The Brazilian media picked up on the director’s report and the mysterious communist crime group became a national story. If inmates across Rio State hadn’t heard of this collective of prisoners before, then they had now.

  At first, the Pit prisoners resented the name that had been invented by a prisoner director.

  “We had been thoroughly demonized,” William writes. “Words are not neutral. We had become a ‘commando,’ which in military language signifies an active center that must be destroyed by its opponents. And as if that was not enough, we were also ‘red,’ an adjective which has always aroused murderous reflexes among the police and the military.”4

  However, as the name spread through prisons and streets gathering mystique, William and the others eventually warmed to it.

  “We said, ‘Well we’re reds aren’t we.’ And we began to use it with pride.”

  The growth of the Red Commando made the Brazilian dictatorship realize that locking up political prisoners with gangsters did more harm than good. And in that same year, they passed an amnesty law, granting political prisoners freedom despite being in guerrilla groups, shooting soldiers, and robbing banks.

  The Red Commando was not the only reason for the 1979 amnesty. The military regime appointed a new president in General João Baptista Figueiredo, who declared he wanted to steer Brazil back to democracy. He allowed more freedom of the press and promised free elections (which took another decade to come about). The country was also in economic turmoil after oil prices shot up, and some generals thought it better to let civilians handle the mess.

  The amnesty allowed thousands of exiles to return. Gabeira, who had kidnapped the U.S. ambassador, came back from Sweden where he had been living. The regime pardoned his crimes and this was when he posed on the beach in a women’s G-string. It was an era of reconciliation.

  The amnesty had a flip side that was even more controversial. As well as pardoning the leftist militants, it also pardoned police, soldiers, and prison guards of their murders, angering human rights defenders. Whatever they had done, everybody was given a clean slate.

  Everybody, that is, except for William and other common criminals in the Red Commando.

  William looks irate when he talks about this. The political prisoners they had been fighting side by side with could walk out of jail free and climb in politics or the media. But William and others stayed in the filthy prisons. William is particularly miffed as he was convicted under the dictatorship’s same laws.

  Of course, it is hard to justify releasing convicts who had robbed banks for personal gain. But William sees his crimes as political in a broader sense, and himself as a robber because he was born poor. This echoes a self-justification made by gangsters across the Americas.

  To William, it stank of betrayal. However, he wasn’t going to be second best to middle-class leftists. If the regime wouldn’t free him, he would find his own way out. On January 2, 1980, William escaped from Ilha Grande. In doing so, he took the Red Commando from the cellblock to the ghetto.

  CHAPTER 10

  William took advantage of the amnesty turmoil and New Year celebrations to make his move. He smuggled in a revolver, arranged to work on the outside perimeter, and tore off into the jungle.

  Even away from the prison building, it was tough to escape the torturous island. Many inmates who tried had been hunted down by guards or had starved to death in the wild. But fortune shined on William when he found students who had come on a speedboat for a New Year’s camping trip.

  He swung out his gun to commandeer their boat. But there was no bloodbath. In the spirit of Brazilian sociality, William made friends with the campers and went off to another island where they passed the night drinking whiskey. When the campers left, one of them lent William clothes, and he arrived on the mainland wearing shorts and Hawaiian sandals.

  Walking into town, William called up friends, who promptly arrived with guns and announced they were planning a bank job. William wanted in.

  Over his next months on the run, William went on the most spectacular bank-robbing spree of his career. With his contacts from the growing Red Commando, he got intelligence on stashes, firearms to go in blasting, and outlaws to back him up. Among them was another seasoned commando stickup artist called José “Zé Bigode” Saldanha, or Joe Mustache. (He wore a handlebar mustache.)

  “We would go in and shout, ‘This is the Red Commando, get down!’” remembers William, joy shining through his eyes. “Then we would shoot down photos of politicians and throw firebombs at police.”

  Following the fusion with the guerrillas, the Red Commando claimed its robberies made a political statement. Brazilian journalist Carlos Amorim writes how they expressed themselves in their newfound revolutionary terms: “The vocabulary of crime found new words. Robberies were ‘expropriations,’ or ‘taking back.’ A gang became a ‘collective,’ and was baptized with a name like ‘liberation group.’”1

  William made—or expropriated—a lot of money in these robberies. But now seeing himself as a resistance fighter, he didn’t keep the money for himself, instead spreading it through the Red Commando’s web. Some cash went back into prisons to support comrades behind bars. This set a tradition in the commando that carries on today. Those on the outside pay the hoods in jail, providing members with a kind of insurance scheme.

  They also gave money to a guerrilla group that had been involved in the formation of the Red Commando, William says. Despite the amnesty law, some guerrillas still operated until the dictatorship ended. William complains a lot of money disappeared into the hands of guerilla leaders who later became politicians.

  “Who knows what they did with the money?” William sighs lightly, his anger seeming to
have dissipated over the decades.

  William also turned his loot into charity. He took to ground in favelas in northern Rio such as one called Serrinha, where he had prison buddies. It was a good place to evade the police, getting lost in the labyrinth of alleys. In his newfound neighborhood, William bought concrete to pave the street and paid for the sewage system. This began the tradition of the commando financing community schemes—or buying the support of residents not to snitch.

  While criminals had given handouts in the slums before, the commando was novel in its sprawling network and sense of mission. The Reds’ spectacular bank robberies made front pages, adding to their mystique. Young hoods lined up to join.

  As membership mushroomed, Red Commando leaders decided they had to teach the young gunslingers the values they had learned on the prison island. So they wrote a pamphlet with twelve points and passed it round. Police later found a copy from a captured bank robber and nicknamed it “The Manual of the Good Bandit.”2

  The journalist Amorim points out that it was in a similar format to a pamphlet used by a guerrilla cell whose members had been involved in the commando. But in many ways, the manual is apolitical. Some of its commandments try to instill limits on violence. Number five is to “Respect woman, children and the vulnerable.”

  Others are tips on how to be an effective criminal, such as number three, which says to “Always have a gun that is clean and with bullets.”