by Ioan Grillo
The Red Commando point man to deal with the FARC was Luiz Fernando da Costa, alias Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or Seaside Freddy. Born in a Rio favela in 1967, Seaside joined the army at eighteen, before police arrested him for robbing jewelry stores and selling drugs. In prison, he got to know Red Commando leaders including William and gained their respect. “He is a good man,” William tells me. “A good friend.”
Seaside was also a violent, jealous man. Brazilian police tapped a phone call in which he ordered the murder of a guy who dated his former girlfriend. He told his thugs to cut off the man’s hands, feet, and ears with a chain saw before shooting him, according to the transcript.
Escaping prison in 1997, Seaside moved around Surinam, Bolivia, and Paraguay, buying guns for the commando. U.S. agents following the FARC then spotted him in Colombia in 2001, in a town called Barranco Minas. Over three months, Seaside delivered 2,400 handguns and 543 rifles to the guerrillas in exchange for cocaine, according to informants cited in U.S. court documents.7 Seaside was working with the head of the guerrillas’ sixteenth front, a commander called Tomás Molina.
The Rio security minister flew to Washington to discuss the case with American and Colombian agents. They launched Operation Black Cat to get the Red Commando trafficker.
It wasn’t an easy takedown. Colombian forces struck Barranco Minas and shot Seaside three times, but he got away in a Cessna plane. Again, the Colombian military tracked him and shot his aircraft down. Still, Seaside wasn’t giving up. While hundreds of soldiers hunted him, he fled through 150 miles of jungle toward the Venezuelan border. But before he could make it over the line, soldiers descended upon him. Wounded and exhausted, Seaside was captured without a shot, and Colombia extradited him to Brazil.
However, Seaside’s arrest didn’t stop the cocaine flow. New commando bosses filled his shoes, going back to Colombia and turning to Peru, which has stepped up its cocaine production to cater for the booming markets. The United Nations estimated that Peru churned out 340 tons of cocaine in 2013, compared to 309 tons in Colombia. While Brazilian jails hit record overcrowding, the cocaine pipeline keeps flowing, keeping the baggies of powder full from tables in the Antares favela to nightclubs in London.
CHAPTER 12
Cocaine profits boosted the Red Commando to a size that William had never imagined. But the white gold that spurred its growth drove it into conflict. Traffickers ordered the death of anyone caught stealing from drug shops and stash houses. And midlevel commanders fought over money, leading to splinter groups.
The biggest break off became the Third Commando. The name was first used in the early 1990s, although some of the Third’s traffickers were drifting away before. The Third Commando created an identical structure to the Reds, with operatives running drug shops under the command of favela bosses. However, they distinguished themselves by taking the moral high ground of saying they wouldn’t sell crack—a claim that several traffickers I talk to confirm as being sincere.
In the late nineties, another commando calling itself the Amigos dos Amigos, or Friends of Friends, also emerged, making it an even more complicated battlefield. The splinters meant the Red Commando not only fought police but also other favela armies, who all recruited thousands of soldiers. In some favelas, former police officers and others formed militias to hit back against the drug dealers—and forced residents to pay protection for this service. The rival commandos and militias battled back and forth over territory, creating a patchwork of shifting turf across the ghettos of Rio State.
The fighting made Brazil’s murder rate skyrocket. In 1980, there were thirteen thousand homicides in Brazil; by 1992, this rose to twenty-eight thousand. By 2003, there were fifty-one thousand murders. It is one of the most extreme spikes of violence in the continent. In Rio State alone, fifty-two thousand people were killed in a decade.
* * *
The violence exploded just as Brazil was trying to demilitarize. The guerrilla uprising was over, the Cold War finished, civil liberties written into new laws. Yet, instead of peace, Brazilian security forces found themselves up against more guns than ever.
One of those policing this bloodbath is Rodrigo Oliveira, commander of an elite Rio police unit called the Coordenadoria de Recursos Especiais (CORE). He joined the force in 1994 and has served twenty years, shooting it out with drug traffickers in the worst favelas.
Walking through the police base to meet him, I see his squad’s vehicles resemble tanks with shooting holes and thick armor that has been pockmarked by bullets. The CORE is a bit like a SWAT team in the United States. Except it has seen far more action. Its logo is a skull with a knife through it and its officers are built like wrestlers with muscles bulging out of their necks. Many practice Brazilians’ own strand of jujitsu and are fans of Ultimate Fighting Championship. They are seriously combat hardened.
Commander Oliveira seems remarkably happy for somebody with such a high-risk job. After we talk for ten minutes, he reveals that he has a bullet embedded in the back of his head from a shootout with traffickers. The bullet hit him when he was called in to help two officers who were cornered in a house under fire. A colleague hauled Oliveira out, saving his life. It was the day of Oliveira’s son’s first birthday.
“The bullet stuck in my head and the doctors couldn’t get it out.” Oliveira points to the back of his braincase. “I was in the hospital for two days, and one week later I was back at work. There is a reason for that. If you stop, you are going to be afraid the next time. You can’t stop.”
The son of a Rio tax lawyer, Oliveira said he always dreamed of being a police officer. However, he joined the army first, where he spent four years. Paradoxically, he saw no combat in the army, but he has been in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of firefights in his two decades in the police.
“I have lost count. Every day we go into the favelas we are under fire. Nowadays the guys from the army come here to train with us. Instead of police training with the military, it is the military training with the police. Right now we have U.S. Navy SEALs here learning our tactics. We have a very particular laboratory.”
The U.S. special forces are interested in Rio’s police officers because they are some of the most experienced in the world at a certain type of combat: fighting urban war at super close quarters. The narrow favela streets often force CORE officers to abandon their armored vehicles. They move in pairs, covering each other and linking to the following pair in a chain, a tactic that is heavily drilled. A constant challenge is to be on higher ground than the commando gunmen. To avoid being outflanked, officers work out routes through the labyrinthine slums and rely on helicopters flying overhead.
Even the helicopters are vulnerable. In 2009, Red Commando gunmen in a favela known as Morro dos Macacos, or Monkey Hill, fired at a police chopper, shooting the driver in the leg. He crashed the helicopter into a soccer field, where it exploded, killing two officers.
This intensity of favela combat has captured the attention of soldiers around the world. It has even become the setting of a video game set in conflict zones. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 re-creates a favela in graphic detail, with the alleys and staircases coming alive for joystick warriors. The gangsters in the game are called the Brazilian Militia—and look suspiciously like the Red Commando. Their symbol is a blood-red hand. The fights of Brazil’s traffickers and police are replayed in bedrooms from Tokyo to Toronto.
For Oliveira and his colleagues, it’s no video game. They not only face the high-caliber firearms stolen from South American armies. Traffickers also use homemade explosives that are perilously unpredictable. A specialized CORE bomb unit diffuses these IEDs. Its officers often get fingers or limbs blown off.
“The guys from the bomb squad all have problems with their hands and with their bodies.” Oliveira shakes his head. “It’s like a ghost train. They don’t speak very well and they don’t listen very well. You don’t have to be crazy to work there. But it helps.”
The joke shields pain over a
steady loss of colleagues. In 2014 alone, 306 officers in Rio were shot, eighty-seven of whom died. One death that particularly hurt Oliveira was that of the colleague who saved his life. Gunmen fired at him while he was riding in a helicopter, leaving him dead in the seat.
“It was terrible. I couldn’t do for him what he did for me. He was just twenty-eight years old.”
Oliveira says the killing makes him feel anger toward the Red Commando and its founders such as William.
“I just want to shoot them.” His face hardens. “It is an option for them. They choose and I make my choice.”
Many in the force feel such hatred. They refer to the criminals as vagabundos, or vagabonds, a defined enemy, just as the commando gunmen call the police “Germans.” The hate of the other drives both sides.
Human rights defenders argue that it is the officers who are too trigger-happy. Brazil’s police kill about two thousand people every year for allegedly attacking them or resisting arrest, according to Amnesty International. One Rio officer was recently charged for an extrajudicial killing, and it was revealed he had been in shootouts in which sixty-two civilians were killed.
Oliveira says that civilian deaths are tragic, but blames the commandos for operating inside densely populated neighborhoods.
“We are in a war. The drug gangs compete in an arms race and bring weapons of war into the city. The population is in the middle of this combat. It is a war that won’t finish, because the drug dealers are in the middle of the communities.”
Such trials and tribulations are re-created in the painfully realistic Tropa de Elite movies about Rio cops. Police complained about the films showing officers shoving plastic bags over suspects’ heads and shooting like crazy in Red Commando favelas. But they perhaps missed the nuance; the cops are painted as flawed heroes, risking their lives while many in society hate them. In one scene, a black policeman speaks out in a law class and tells the cop-hating students, “You don’t know how many children enter drug trafficking and die. In your [middle-class] neighborhoods, you don’t see these type of things. You’re misinformed.” The second Elite Squad film was the highest grossing Brazilian movie of all time.1
I ask Oliveira what he thinks about the Red Commando’s claim to fight for the poor. He sighs and scolds the military dictatorship for locking up bank robbers with guerrillas.
“This is what you get when you mix political prisoners with common prisoners,” Oliveira laments. “The common prisoners start having an ideology, and they learn how to organize.”
However, he denies that the community really loves the Red Commando. “Maybe only five percent like these guys. The other ninety-five percent don’t like them. But they are scared to oppose them.”
While the gangs have thousands of affiliates in Rio State, Oliveira points out that they are still a tiny minority among two million favela dwellers.
Back with William, I ask if this war is really a good thing. Tens of thousands have died. Has this made anyone freer?
William, as always, answers slowly and firmly. He blames the police for perpetrating the violence. “Who brings the guns into the favelas?” he asks. “It’s the officers making money out of this. They want the war to continue.”
Some police officers have indeed been convicted of gunrunning, although commando traffickers such as Seaside Freddy also smuggled weapons. When I point this out to William, he reaffirms his phrase of defiance. “The Red Commando is the resistance.” William sees it as a sign of strength and dignity that the commando has resisted the security forces for three decades and that there is still no sign of police destroying it.
CHAPTER 13
William voices the politicized vision of the Red Commando’s founders. But I wonder how much the gun-toting youth on the street today share his quasi-socialist perspective. The drug dealers shout the name Red Commando to electro beats, but how much do they know about urban guerrillas and military dictatorships? I want to find out how revolutionary the Red Commando really is behind the slogans.
At the Antares drug shop, I talk to Lucas, the young manager, who showed me his photo with the Brazilian soccer star. He tells me he has just finished his shift, and we go to a small bar-restaurant and chat while we sip Coca-Cola out of plastic cups. After working in Mexico, where cartels are aggressive to anyone discussing their business, I am surprised how openly he talks about the crime world here, using the name of the Red Commando without hushing his voice.
Lucas is exhausted. I ask him how long he worked, and he tells me he does twenty-four shifts on and off. In each shift, he will move thousands of dollars, but he only makes a small percentage.
The Red Commando has developed a hierarchical model, he explains. The head honchos are the copula of gangster chiefs in the penitentiaries. They decide who will be the boss of each favela, known as a dono. Lucas is then one of several gerentes de boca—or “drug mouth bosses.” Defending the turf are the soldados, or “soldiers,” flashing the big guns in the parties. On the bottom rung, the skinny kids who waved drugs at me are called “vapors.” The name is because they should vanish into thin air if the cops come—although they are a loud bunch.
“This work might look easy, but it is tiring and stressful,” Lucas says. “You have to keep alert, watch the money all the time, watch the drugs, watch the customers, watch the sellers. That is why I look so old. I am only twenty-eight, but I look like I am in my thirties.”
Actually, I don’t think Lucas looks so bad for his age. He has a slim, athletic build in his designer T-shirt and gold medallion. I ask if he plays sports, and he nods his head vigorously. He hasn’t always been a drug dealer, he tells me. He played professional soccer, keeping goal, for much of his adult life.
At first, I think he might be boasting. But I discover there are thousands of professional players recruited in neighborhoods like these to kick balls in minor leagues for pitiful wages. Brazil has a whopping five hundred professional soccer clubs with twenty-three thousand players, way more than anywhere else in the world. It also exports more than a thousand players a year to clubs around the globe, with a handful going to top teams in Spain, England, and Italy.
This dream of playing professional soccer fills the hearts of many favela kids. But I hear it can be a burden as much as a boost. Some don’t bother to study as they think they are going to be the next Ronaldinho or Neymar. Instead, they end up like Lucas, selling blow.
I ask Lucas why he left the game as goalkeepers can play till they are forty. He looks sad. He explains that he had a fight with a player on a rival team. The player was a member of the shady militia that operates in the neighboring enemy favela.
“He said he was going to kill me and steal my organs. I had to go back to the Red Commando. They are the only ones who can protect me.”
Lucas was born in Antares and has no roots outside. Favelas used to be places that people emigrated to searching for something better. Now they are places people are born and die in, too often violently. His father worked for a time at a public waterworks but then himself got into drug dealing as the trade grew in the eighties. Lucas was one of his father’s fifteen children with various women.
Despite the risks of the Red Commando, Lucas enlisted when he was twelve, leaving school after sixth grade to hit the streets.
“I wanted fame at that time,” Lucas says. “I was never scared. I am not frightened of gunfights. I love the adrenaline.”
This is typical. Many of the new generation sign up before they are teenagers. A report on the young gunslingers by Luke Dowdney, called Children of the Drug Trade, refers to them as “child soldiers.” It is a valid description.1
Lucas soon saw plenty of blood. He had a good friend who became a crack addict and stole some money. The commando ordered him to return the cash, but he failed to pay up.
“I tried to help him, but I couldn’t,” Lucas tells me. “They covered him with gasoline and burned him alive.”
When Lucas was fourteen, he tasted intense combat w
hen traffickers from Antares were called to support the Red’s position in another favela against the Third Commando. His first job was to hand ammunition clips to a commando soldier using a machine gun, but as the battle went on for several days he took up a gun himself. “I earned respect for the way I could fight. I became a soldier.”
Since his bloody initiation, Lucas has been in more gun battles than he can remember. He shows a bullet wound on his leg. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, saving his life. He proudly describes spraying bullets at police when they come into the favela.
I ask Lucas if he feels guilty about police who have died at the hand of the commando. He shakes his head forcefully.
“The police are shit. You let the police in your door and they kill you. They kill kids. They kill anybody.”
This strong stance against police fits in with the founders’ thinking. Lucas, like William, hates what he sees as a repressive state. Lucas also defends the Red Commando’s social projects such as paying for a rudimentary sewer system in Antares. He adds that the commando will pay for medicine if people are sick and for funerals when they die.
“The city doesn’t do anything for us,” Lucas says. “So we have to do it ourselves.”
Furthermore, the commando doesn’t shake down businesses or rob people in the neighborhood, Lucas says. Instead, they provide a certain security. They are a like a mini oil state; they don’t charge tax but provide services, asking only for loyalty in return.
But when I ask Lucas about political movements and ideology his face turns blank. He keeps selling drugs to support his wife and six-year-old daughter, he tells me, but he wants a way out.
