by Ioan Grillo
The next year, in 1993, a group of inmates in the nearby Taubaté prison founded the PCC. According to the gang’s creation story, they made their pact during a soccer game. William says one of these founders was a friend of his, a man who had been in prison in Rio and seen the power of the Reds.
“He took the seed of the Red Commando and planted it in São Paulo.” William flashes with pride. “They took the rebellion to their city.”
Another prisoner who founded the PCC and became its most vocal leader has a strikingly similar profile to William, and by coincidence is his namesake (almost). Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as Marcola, also came from a broken home, was arrested as a teenage pickpocket, became a bank robber, served years in prison, and escaped repeatedly. And like William, he is a keen reader, telling a parliamentary committee in 2006 that he likes Nietzsche, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire.
His rhetoric is also similar to William’s. He responded to questions from the parliamentary committee with a discourse reflecting the same mix of class struggle and social banditry.
“Our idealism is that of solidarity, of the prisoner knowing that there is great injustice in the penitentiary system,” Marcola told the committee. “Since we’re children we get used to living with misery and violence. In any slum there are daily murders. Violence is natural for the prisoner. That’s why the prisoners’ organizations oppose that violent nature. What do they do? They forbid the inmates to take certain attitudes that would be normal to them, but that invade the other guy’s space. Do you understand that?”1
The PCC took the Red Commando’s slogan of “Liberty, Justice, and Peace.” Furthermore, it wrote a statute, similar to the Red’s “Manual of the Good Bandit” if a little more sophisticated. The PCC’s statute has sixteen points and refers to itself as a Party—with a capital P. (It’s sometimes called the Party of Crime.) The statute is full of talk of resistance, such as point number 16, in which it enshrines its allegiance to the Rio mob.
“In alliance with the Red Commando, we will revolutionize the country from inside the prisons and our armed wing will be of Terror,” it says in the statute, which has been found on various prisoners. “United we will conquer.”2
Like in Rio, the PCC spread into favelas. But in São Paulo, the commando took a different form. Its gangsters don’t flash rifles and brazenly sell dope off tables, but operate more clandestinely, selling drugs inside safe houses or by delivery and keeping guns hidden. However, they still control residents’ associations, operate alternative trials, and sell narcotics by the bucketload.
Everton Luiz Zanella is a top organized crime prosecutor in São Paulo with the life-risking job of making cases against the mob. He recently brought racketeering charges against dozens of its cellblock leaders, resulting in extended sentences. Meeting in his headquarters, the lean attorney concedes that despite his efforts, the PCC keeps growing.
“The PCC not only keeps getting bigger here in São Paulo. It is also expanding in other Brazilian states and even in neighboring countries like Paraguay and Bolivia,” Zanella tells me. “It’s not only a problem here, it’s an international problem.”
The PCC is so strong in São Paulo because it has no major rival. Marcola and his cohorts have managed to stop splinters from breaking off or adversaries from moving in. As the PCC lacks enemy gunmen, an odd thing has happened: While it has grown, the homicide rate in São Paulo has gone down, from more than fifteen thousand murders in 2001 to fifty-six hundred by 2011.
This is a paradox of Latin America’s crime wars. Having a single strong mafia means less violence than if there were several weaker groups. This lack of opposition, however, makes the PCC a more forbidding opponent for the government. It has murdered hundreds of police officers, prison guards, and judges. But two major attacks stand out for making the government tremble, the first in 2006 and the second in 2012.
When Paulistas (the residents of São Paulo) went to bed on the night of May 11, 2006, it appeared to be a Thursday like any other, the drawing to a close of a week in the hectic megalopolis. But in the early hours of Friday morning, gunmen—fifteen cars of them—appeared outside a São Paulo police base, spraying it with bullets and hurling grenades and firebombs. In other parts of the city, smaller stations came under fire. Police sent backup, only for cars to be pinned down in ambushes.
News of the attacks spread through the city the following day, alongside rumors that gangsters were going to hit downtown. Office managers let people leave early and pull their kids from school, causing marathon traffic jams that paralyzed the city. As cars were snarled in gridlock, gunmen hit several more police bases.
On Saturday morning, São Paulo’s governor said the situation was under control. But it had only just started. Attacks spread to government offices, banks, and a shopping center. The gunmen ordered passengers off buses and torched them on the streets. Many stayed in their homes as the violence raged into Sunday, watching live reports of burning buildings and crying family members in hospital wards.
More than seventy prisons across the state erupted into simultaneous riots. Inmates took hostages and climbed on penitentiary roofs waving their fists at camera crews sweeping over in helicopters.
Then just as suddenly, the attacks stopped on Monday morning. Paulistas cautiously held their breath and went back onto the streets to see the carnage, the burned-out banks, the bullet-ridden police stations, the funerals of officers and civilians.
The final figures were staggering. There had been more than five hundred attacks. Eighty-two buses were burned. Eleven banks were heavily damaged. Thirty-three police officers and eight prisons guards were dead, and many more injured, some crippled for life. And more than seventy civilians, including a mix of suspected attackers and innocents caught in the crossfire, had been killed.
The PCC had carried out a bigger offensive than the urban guerrillas of the seventies could ever imagine. It had turned a booming financial center into a war zone in a split second. The logistics alone are remarkable. The PCC showed it could move thousands of operatives to make simultaneous, disciplined attacks over a metropolis of three thousand square miles.
As calm returned, Paulistas all asked the million-dollar question: Why? What was the motive behind the biggest attack on the government in modern Brazil?
I hear three motives to explain the offensive. The first is the most heavily cited in the media. According to this version, the PCC launched the attacks in response to the São Paulo state government ordering the transfer of PCC prisoners, including Marcola, into secure units. The prisoners responded with the “Terror,” with a capital T, they warn about in their statute.
The second version is one that some Brazilian journalists mutter privately but they are cautious about printing. According to this account, corrupt police officers had kidnapped Marcola’s stepson for ransom. There have been previous cases of Brazilian police officers kidnapping the families of drug traffickers. The traffickers normally pay up. According to the rumors, Marcola did the same this time and handed money to the police. But instead of releasing him, they asked for even more cash. And he ordered the attacks.
The third version is frighteningly banal. The PCC had ordered sixty flat-screen TVs to watch the World Cup, which was to start in under four weeks. But someone in the prison system had hijacked the TVs. The PCC carried out the attacks to get the TVs back.
I ask the organized crime prosecutor Zanella about these theories. He acknowledges hearing all three of them, but says he has no conclusive evidence. Perhaps it was a combination of them all, a cumulative effect of tensions that led to the PCC letting out the dogs.
There are signs that PCC demands were met following the attacks. Some prisoners had their transfers canceled. “The government can use the justification that a transfer would put the prisoner in danger with rival gangs,” Zanella says. Media also reported that the plasma TVs found their way to the cellblocks. And there are rumors that Marcola’s stepson was released by his abductors. W
hen I ask about this last point, he smiles. “I have heard the story, but there is no official record of this kidnapping.”
The Chicago academic Ben Lessing tries to discern what lies behind the violence in crime wars. One driving force, he argues, is what he calls “violent lobbying.” This is violence aimed at pressuring officials to change certain policies such as prisoner transfers, troop deployments, or extradition laws. Gangsters murder police, burn banks, and set off car bombs as a form of political pressure to achieve their demands.
“They are saying to officials, ‘I am serious and I can inflict a lot of pain on you. So you’d better do what I am asking,’” Lessing says.
This would fit it in with the PCC’s motivation here—whether those demands were to stop a transfer to secure units, free a kidnapped kid, or to be able to watch Brazil get knocked out of the World Cup by France (as happened that year).
The São Paulo terror of 2006 made world headlines (for a couple of days). But less reported was the wave of attacks in the week that followed. This time it was not criminals hitting police, but police killing civilians.
Police officers were understandably enraged by the attacks against them. They were also frustrated. It was tough to find the gunmen, hidden in the sprawling metropolis. So police hunted through favelas searching for the culprits.
Officers admit shooting dead 123 criminals in eight days following the attacks. But human rights defenders say it was many more. These activists have gathered evidence of 493 civilians being killed over the period, including those shot dead by police and others murdered by mysterious masked gunmen. The human rights defenders say these triggermen were officers in plain clothes acting as death squads. The police were out for blood, they say, and went on a revenge killing spree.
Debora Santos, a working-class Paulista housewife, describes to me the night that her son Edoson was killed. On the Monday following the PCC attacks, she had Edoson over for dinner. They were talking about the turmoil like everybody across São Paulo, and were shocked by it. Edson had been a difficult youth who had served time in prison for robbery. But she was pleased that he had gone straight, working as a street cleaner, enjoying being a father to his three-year-old son. He left late on his motorcycle. That was the last time she saw him alive.
The next day, his boss called looking for him. She was surprised that he didn’t show up to work as he had been vigilant about keeping his hours. “I couldn’t believe it. I called everywhere but there was no sign of him. Then I heard on the radio that dozens of people had been killed. We went down to the morgue. And there I saw his corpse.”
Debora worked to reconstruct the case. After Edoson had left her house, he had been stopped by police officers at a gas station, witnesses said. The police questioned him about his criminal record and he had replied that he had done his time and was straight now. Leaving the police, he rode on his motorcycle down the street when masked gunmen shot him dead.
Debora was at first too devastated to do anything. “I went into deep depression after my son’s killing. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Then after forty days, I had a vision in which I saw him. He came to me and said, ‘Mama, you have a mission to fight against these murders.’”
She found other families who had lost loved ones in the killing spree. Many had similar stories, of people being questioned by police at checkpoints and attacked shortly afterward. Their suspicion was that police were locating anyone with criminal records and passing their details to waiting death squads.
The number of families grew, becoming known as the Month of May Movement. They gathered evidence but prosecutors said there was still insufficient proof to show police carried out the murders. They carry on their struggle today.
Debora shows me a Father’s Day card that her grandson recently wrote.
“I love you Dad. I’ll always love you and I wish you could come and see me. I wish you could collect me from school. Sometimes, I feel that you are by my side. Happy Father’s Day.”
Media covering Latin America have seriously overlooked the story of the “Month of May Murders.” If the protesters are right then São Paulo police may have murdered almost as many people in eight days as Brazil’s military dictatorship did in twenty years. It is one of the worst massacres in the history of the Americas.
However, the police deny the death squad accusations and claim it was the gangsters themselves who were behind the hits. Many Brazilians have also rallied round the officers, feeling more scared by the specter of the PCC. A handful of policemen were put on trial over some of the shootings. In almost all the cases, juries acquitted the officers, saying they acted in self-defense.
Many people have short memories. The 2006 violence in São Paulo flared up with its great intensity and dissipated just as fast. Mothers like Debora stumble on with the pain of their loss as do the families of slain police officers. But for millions of other Paulistas life simply went back to the grind. This is a strange characteristic of the Latin American crime wars: Intense violence can break out in a flash, and disappear just as fast.
In July 2012, the PCC launched another sinister campaign. This time, it wasn’t a weekend of terror but lasted several months. Gunmen ambushed police officers on patrol; murdered them arriving to work; killed them finishing shifts. Police tried to reinforce security but it is hard to defend against assassins who come out of nowhere dressed like millions of others in the crowded streets. Fifty police officers were killed, then seventy, then ninety. By November, the assassins had murdered 109 officers.
Finally, the state’s head of public security resigned. And the attacks stopped like clockwork.
I hear accounts that the PCC had a problem with the security head, a former military officer named Antonio Ferreira Pinto, and had been killing police to force his resignation. When they got their demand, the assassinations stopped. It was, in Ben Lessing’s terms, a classic case of “violent lobbying.”
The prosecutor Zanella confirms he heard this, but it cannot be proven. “They didn’t like Pinto because he had come from the military,” he says. “Afterwards, the state government put a civilian in the job.”
A dangerous pattern has emerged in Brazil. The government is repressive, the commando uses violence, and the government gives concessions. It’s a vicious circle.
Right now, the PCC is on the periphery of the city. But what if it pushes downtown and takes a piece of big businesses? What if they move into shakedowns and kidnapping as gangsters in Mexico and Central America have? The specter is of a crime group with a monopoly on its rackets poised on the edge of the biggest economic base in South America.
CHAPTER 15
“I have the honor to announce that the games of the thirty-first Olympiad are awarded to the city of …”
OOC President Jacques Rogge fumbled with an Olympic-size envelope in October 2009, as sports fans, mayors, and presidents held their breath. When he finally managed to pull out the card and read the answer, “Rio de Janeiro,” the Brazilian delegation led by President Lula exploded. The 2016 Summer Olympics would be in Brazil, the first time ever that South America would hold the games.
President Obama was more serene. The bookies’ favorite, Chicago, was beaten out alongside Madrid and Tokyo. South America had trumped Asia, Europe, and the United States.
The Rio win was doubly sweet as it came on the back of Brazil capturing the equally coveted 2014 World Cup. These awards in turn followed sustained growth in Brazil and the discovery of new oil fields, boosting the economy to the seventh largest on the planet. Lula oversaw this boom, steering a party of leftists to run a popular centrist government.
“That’s my man right here,” President Obama said at a G-20 summit he attended with Lula. “Love this guy. He’s the most popular politician on earth. It’s because of his good looks.”1
Lula indeed scored high popularity ratings, leaving office in 2010 with over 80 percent approval. His status allowed him to handpick his successor, Dilma, the former guerrilla. Brazil was on
the path to becoming a new superpower, pundits said. New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter released a book that year entitled Brazil on the Rise.
* * *
However, Rio’s breathtaking landscape had an embarrassing sore that its rulers didn’t want world athletes seeing when they arrived to throw javelins and somersault into swimming pools. In the favelas, Red Commando gunmen waved their Kalashnikovs and touted their drug baggies.
To remedy this, Rio’s governor backed a policy called “Pacification,” in which police and soldiers would force out commando gunmen and reinsert the power of the state. Favelas would be transformed from the surreal scenes of gangster-governed ghettos to generic urban neighborhoods. Tellingly, the term pacification was also used by the U.S. Army to clean insurgents out of villages in Vietnam.
The Rio Pacification program had begun modestly in late 2008—after Brazil had been awarded the World Cup and while bidding for the Olympics was in process. It started with officers setting up what they called a Police Pacifying Unit, or UPP, in one of the tamest slums, Santa Marta. The downtown favela is the scene of the video for Michael Jackson’s hit “They Don’t Care About Us,” in which the star prances around the sloping streets and points an accusing finger at a police officer.
Following the Olympic decision, the government put its weight firmly behind Pacification and expanded it across the urban sprawl. By the eve of the World Cup in 2014, forty UPPs stood in favelas under the eye of the towering Jesus.
