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

by Ioan Grillo

  Rio’s police commanders created a unique model to install UPPs, one which governments across the hemisphere watch. First they announce on television that they are going to enter, giving the date to deliberately allow criminals to flee. Officers then invade in overwhelming force backed by soldiers and marines to set up the UPP base. Rather than leaving, as the police had done for decades, the UPP officers stay round the clock, making sure the commando gunmen don’t return to the street.

  Without a doubt, the Pacification scheme has transformed certain favelas. Police officers now patrol some streets where commando gunmen ruled for decades. Traffickers may still sell drugs, but they do it more quietly from inside houses rather than in public view.

  The scheme has coincided with a little gentrification in which bohemian foreigners and Brazilians buy property around the slums. I find an American screenwriter who has bought a home in a favela and an Italian who has opened a fish restaurant on the edge of one. Most importantly, the Rio State government claims that homicides have hurtled down 65 percent in pacified communities.

  Security pundits looked to the Pacification scheme as a model that could be applied to crime-ridden ghettos across the Americas. It has clear merits. The principle that the government, not gangsters, should run these neighborhoods is obviously a good one.

  But Pacification has shortcomings. Police commander Oliveira says that while it may have cleaned up the center of Rio for tourists, many favelas in the sprawling city are unaffected. For example, Antares on the outskirts remains as strongly in the grip of the Reds as ever. The police simply do not have the numbers to be in all the favelas all the time.

  “You just transfer the problem from one area to another area,” Oliveira says. “If I tell a criminal that I am going to his house tomorrow, is he going to stay in his house? Of course not. And that is what has happened. Now the problem has gone from the middle of the city to the periphery.”

  There is also tension in pacified territories, with police murdering residents they are meant to be saving. Two months before the World Cup, a well-known dancer, Douglas Rafael da Silva, was shot dead in the Pavão Pavãozinho slum, which snakes up from Copacabana Beach. Unlike most of those killed in favelas, Da Silva was a success story who danced on a popular TV show, and his death provoked protests that turned into riots.

  I go to the site where Da Silva was killed. He was shot on the roof of a building and fell twenty meters into a nursery. Police claim they were returning fire with drug traffickers and weren’t sure whose bullet hit Da Silva. But witnesses I speak to say that police fired at unarmed youths because they were smoking marijuana and hit the dancer.

  “Police are totally unprepared for working in this community,” says Paulo dos Santos, a neighbor and actor who had worked with Da Silva. “They are the law, but they don’t respect it. We don’t want these type of cops.”

  Such rejection of the police is not universal. Leandro Matus, who owns a bicycle shop next to where Da Silva fell, says he still prefers the police to the hoods. “At least there are less gangsters with guns now,” Matus says. “I don’t trust the police, but they are the lesser of the two evils.”

  But convincing many residents to accept the police over the commandos is a challenge. Oliveira says the government needs to win support by using carrots, not just sticks. Much more government investment needs to go into social programs for pacification to work, he says.

  “The commandos fill the space that should belong to the state,” Oliveira says. “The only part of the state that goes inside these areas is the police. Other parts of the state have to go inside the favelas as well. We need investment in education and in health. But it’s not happening. It is just police officers. This way, we are not going to win this war.”

  The government’s claim of homicides hurtling down also needs to be scrutinized. It is hard to count murders in a small unit such as a single favela; people from there can kill in other places and bodies could be dumped elsewhere. A broad survey of homicides across the state gives a bigger picture. Analyzing the state murder stats, you find that between 2008 and 2012, the number of homicides indeed went down, although by a more modest 25 percent. However in 2013, they went up by 18 percent.

  There are also signs that even if Rio has become somewhat safer, the commandos—and murders—have moved to other Brazilian cities. A decade ago, Maranhão State used to be a backwater known for its Amazon jungle running up to the Atlantic. But in January 2014, Brazilians were shocked by a video of gang members in its biggest prison beheading three inmates. Prison officers leaked the gruesome footage to show the horror they have to deal with. Maranhão has seen a quadrupling of homicides over a decade, as well as bus burning and attacks on police stations reminiscent of the São Paulo violence.

  Other provincial cities also suffer a spike in shootings, crack selling, and commandos. Brazil’s most murderous cities—which are among the most homicidal in the planet—now include Maceio in the far east, Fortaleza in the north, and the historic João Pessoa.

  If you looked at homicides across Brazil like a map of lights, you would see them flashing around the country. The killing zones move, but overall the same amount of light is shining through. After rocketing up in the eighties and nineties, Brazil’s homicide rate has remained stable (and high) over the last decade. This is sadly in spite of economic growth and talk of Brazil becoming a superpower. In 2012, there were 51,108 people murdered in the nation. Considering its population of two hundred million, this doesn’t make Brazil the highest per capita in killings. But it has the highest total number of homicides among any nation outside a declared war zone. It’s a colossal death toll.

  I ask William what he thinks about the Pacification scheme and the idea of Brazil rising. I thought he might have sympathy for Lula and Dilma’s leftist governments as they included comrades from the guerrilla movement. And it was under Lula’s government in 2009 that William was finally authorized to live outside prison, staying in his home with his bracelet on his leg. He is spending the winter of his life in an apartment, not a jail cell.

  However, William has no good words for Lula. “He is a traitor. He promised things but then he put his hands everywhere. He wears different clothes, but he is the same as the rest of the rulers. He is a disgrace to Brazil.”

  William also slams the Pacification scheme. In this, he coincides with the police commander Oliveira, saying the government only cares about sending in force and not providing services.

  “The first thing they do when they pacify favelas is to make sure people pay their electricity bills,” he says.

  But what is the alternative, I ask him. Does he really believe this low-intensity war between the Red Commando and the police can lead to something better? Does he think the movement he created is a good thing?

  William sticks to his guns.

  “It is a war. The police are the aggressors. The Red Commando is the resistance. It doesn’t negotiate with police.”

  William is clear in his conviction of his life’s work; in his final years he has found a peace in himself that he fought for something worthwhile. In his mind, the Red Commando provides a necessary order at the bottom of the society. It gives the criminals a code of honor and pride and puts them on a more level playing field against a repressive system. Society will have to change, he argues, before this changes.

  The Red Commando has so far been content to stay on the periphery of Brazilian society, filling the space in the favelas and prisons. It is the most extreme example of a class-conscious crime movement in the Americas. But many other gangsters also use the language of social injustice to explain their actions. Cavernous inequality and failure of the state at the bottom rungs of society are a key part of Latin America’s crime wars.

  Despite their quasi-political discourse, the Red Commando has only had a limited impact on Brazil’s politicians. But in another part of the continent, a gangster used a ghetto base to catapult himself to the heart of power; he even awarded hi
mself the title of the highest official in the land.

  It is to this president of Jamaica that we now turn.

  PART III

  The President: Jamaica

  The little pirate dem come here and rob up the resources for the country. Because that is what dem been doing a long bloodbath time … I am not a politician but I suffer the consequences.

  —PETER TOSH, ONE LOVE PEACE CONCERT, 1978

  CHAPTER 16

  In the spring of 2010, the beautiful Caribbean island of Jamaica was enjoying a bumper tourist season. More holidaymakers than ever before relished its golden beaches, making it set to have a record two million visits over the year.

  Some stayed inside their five-star resorts, sipping rum punch while protected by gun-toting security guards. Others partied to reggae music in the beach clubs of Montego Bay and Negril and smoked the island’s celebrated sensimilla ganja. Some visited the old plantations to see where for centuries slaves had sweated to churn out the sugar of the British Empire that sweetened tea and cupcakes from Birmingham to Bombay. The most adventurous took trips into the capital, Kingston, to take snaps of the Trench Town slum where the legend Bob Marley grew up and composed melancholic masterpieces such as “No Woman, No Cry.”

  But as the last days of spring flowed into summer, the island erupted like a volcano. Images of shoot-outs between soldiers and mysterious gunmen in Kingston ghettos shot to the world’s top news story. On a tourist plane flying from Montego Bay, the captain told passengers they would have trouble landing in Kingston airport because gangsters were firing close-by with a 50-caliber machine gun. As the bodies piled up, it became clear the “tropical paradise” was suffering its most intense week of unrest since it gained independence from the British Empire in 1962.

  The violence was the legacy of a structure of gangsters that had been growing since that independence, known on the island as the “don system.” Generation after generation of politicians had used the system, allying with shady gunmen to bring in their votes. Now these gangsters were rich from drug profits and had grown into a monster the politicians could no longer control. The fighting centered around the most infamous ever of these dons: Christopher Michael Coke, known more commonly as Dudus, or the President.

  Jamaica doesn’t officially have a president. When it became independent, it transferred power to an elected parliament and prime minister, while keeping the faraway British Queen Elizabeth II as its symbolic monarch. But in the ghettos of West Kingston, many said Dudus was the real ruler of the island, his title, President, making him bigger than the P.M.

  Dudus had run the Caribbean’s largest drug trafficking organization, known as the Shower Posse, for almost two decades with little hassle from Jamaican police. His presidential status seemed to be sanctified when the United States issued an extradition warrant for him for smuggling marijuana, cocaine, and guns, and the Jamaican government refused to act on it. Prime Minister Bruce Golding said it was because the Americans used illegal wiretaps. In West Kingston, they joked that the prime minister did what the president ordered.

  The failure to arrest a notorious crime king pushed Jamaica into political crisis. The opposition called for Golding’s resignation while the United States refused visas for prominent Jamaicans and delayed sending a new ambassador. After eight months of rising pressure, the prime minister finally caved in and on May 17 gave a televised speech promising to detain Dudus.

  The ghetto came to its president’s defense. Residents of West Kingston slums took to the streets saying they would shield the Prezi. “Jesus die for us. We will die for Dudus,” said one banner held by a woman on the Spanish Town Road. “Dudus is the way. We will die fighting,” said another.

  The government took them at their word; it sent out the Jamaican constabulary, one of the most homicidal police forces in the world. But even they weren’t able to storm Dudus’s stronghold, a ghetto called Tivoli Gardens.

  The President’s loyalists blockaded the entrances to Tivoli with towering barricades. The fortifications were built with barrels of concrete, sacks of sand and stone, and burned-out cars and trucks. Former Jamaican soldiers turned mercenaries reinforced defenses with razors, electrified wires, and homemade explosives that used bottles of cooking gas and mobile detonators. Behind the barricades, hundreds of gunmen took to rooftops with assault rifles and machine guns.

  The police surrounded Tivoli, creating an uneasy siege that made residents struggle to get supplies. But the President showed he was not alone. Gunmen from other ghettos rose up and attacked police stations with bullets and firebombs. Two officers died in an ambush. The security forces were being challenged from behind.

  More ghettos joined Dudus, even some that had not traditionally supported him. In a fevered moment, the gangsters felt they could defeat the police. Dudus seemed invincible.

  The shaken Jamaican government declared a state of emergency and ordered out the military. Soldiers took to the streets in full-on Humvees, tanks, and helicopters.

  “We are going to hunt them down as they ought to be hunted down and bring the full brunt of the law on them,” Jamaican Minister of National Security Dwight Nelson avowed.

  Gun battles exploded on the edge of the Tivoli barricades. Even for soldiers, it was a struggle facing gunfire from rooftops and windows. Shooting rattled on and a soldier fell dead, while nineteen more were injured. A local news crew was pinned down under gunfire. Towers of smoke rose from burning buildings.

  When the soldiers and police finally broke through the barricades, they went on a killing spree. While some gunmen still fired sniper shots, most of Dudus’s army saw they were overwhelmed and ran to ground. But for troops steaming through the tower blocks and slum streets, it was a free-fire zone. While bullets riddled the sides of buildings, terrified residents hid in their homes, often lacking food and water. The injured struggled to get through the melee to hospitals. A local morgue was overwhelmed with bodies. Corpses lay on the street being eaten by dogs.1

  After three days of unrest, the Jamaican government announced that the President’s ghetto army had been crushed. In the incursion, seventy-three civilians had been killed, it conceded. Human rights defenders and a former prime minister claimed there were many more deaths and most victims were innocent civilians. The security forces had also rounded up more than a thousand alleged gunmen and piled them into the national soccer stadium because there was no space in the police cells. Fourteen police stations had been attacked, two of them burned to the ground.

  But the object of the manhunt, Dudus himself, had escaped. The security forces were flummoxed as to how he had slipped through the siege lines. He also avoided a mysterious U.S. spy plane spotted flying over Tivoli. People asked if he had invisibility powers along with his biblical status as ruler.

  Some on the street viewed his escape as an act of cowardice, the supreme general abandoning his troops.

  “The man tek off like a puss when him hear the first bum drop,” one of his gunmen told a local newspaper, which is to say, “Dudus had run like a cat when he heard the first artillery fire.”2

  The journalist Gary Spaulding elaborates, in the vibrant prose of Jamaican journalism, that the President had sacrificed his subjects of Tivoli like “lambs to the slaughter.”

  Like a mighty rushing wind, a curious brand of religious fervor descended on western Kingston only days before the torment of Hell intruded.

  Some Tivoli residents had proclaimed with great religious intensity that they were prepared to suffer the ultimate sacrifice for their benefactor and community hero …

  They hollered for reprieve when they were abandoned on the sacrificial altar.

  In a curious paradox to the crucifixion story, it was not one man who had paid dearly for the sins of all.3

  Dudus stayed invisible the following weeks. Police combed the island, with likely support from American agents, but the President seemed to have disappeared in a puff of smoke. The failure to capture him amid growing anger ove
r the Tivoli massacre heaped more pressure on Golding’s government.

  Then after a month, Dudus appeared in anticlimactic if slightly humorous circumstances. Police arrested him at a routine roadblock into Kingston. He was in a car with a well-known evangelical reverend. And he was dressed as a woman, with a curly black wig and round spectacles. At least for Dudus, his mug shot showed him with the black wig and not the pink one he also had in the car.

  A comedy TV show dug the knife in, airing a sketch with a pretend Dudus in drag being stopped at the checkpoint. “This is the church sister Prezi,” the mock reverend says, pointing to the wigged gangster. “I mean Precious, Precious.” Jamaican novelist Kei Miller wrote that “Bad man nuh dress like girl,” quoting a famed reggae song. Miller observed that there is actually a history of cross-dressing gangsters in Jamaica, and concluded, “That bad man dress however de rass him want to dress. And that’s exactly what makes them de real bad men.”4

  Dudus’s supporters said that he used drag as he feared Jamaican police would murder him. Dudus lived with the memory of his father, himself a major drug trafficker, perishing in a mysterious fire in a police cell back in 1992.

  When he was caught, Dudus claimed he was heading to the U.S. Embassy to hand himself in. Once arrested, he immediately waived his right to oppose extradition and traveled swiftly to the United States, where he was relatively safe from angry Jamaican police.

  Dudus survived but his reign was over. And the Jamaican president found his new home in a New York City jail cell.

  When the Kingston unrest exploded, I was covering Mexico’s own worst wave of violence since its revolutionary wars. Watching Jamaica go up in flames, the link was obvious. Mexico was not alone in battling a curious new threat.

  However, few have explored the links between Jamaica’s bloodshed and the wider narco wars of the region. A key reason is that most Jamaicans don’t see themselves as part of Latin America. They speak English and patois rather a Latin tongue and consider themselves culturally closer to Africa. They have forged strong links with the mother continent, where Jamaican leaders tour and Jamaican singers command vast audiences. Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil offer less kinship.