Leonardo Coutinho
The U.S. designation of the Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho as foreign terrorist organizations reflects a strategic reality Brazil has long resisted confronting: its two most powerful criminal structures now use fear not merely to profit, but to govern.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. decision to designate both the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV) as foreign terrorist organizations should not be understood as a conceptual distortion. It is better viewed as a long-delayed recognition of the transformation of Brazil’s two most powerful criminal organizations into hybrid coercive actors.
While both remain deeply rooted in narcotrafficking, money laundering, and organized criminal enterprise, neither can still be understood solely through the traditional lens of organized crime. Each has evolved into a structure that uses fear, coercion, and violence in ways that reach well beyond ordinary criminality and into the realm of political intimidation, territorial governance, and institutional pressure.
The core problem in much of the debate is definitional. Too often, terrorism is treated as a category reserved only for groups animated by explicit ideology, religious doctrine, or revolutionary manifestos. That framework is increasingly outdated.
In the contemporary security environment, terrorism is better understood as a method than as an ideology. A group crosses the threshold when it systematically uses unlawful violence, or the credible threat of violence, to generate fear beyond the immediate victim, intimidate civilian populations, coerce institutions, and shape the political environment in which it operates.
Judged by that standard, both the PCC and CV now fit within a broader understanding of terrorist behavior, even if they arrived there through different trajectories.
That distinction matters. The PCC and CV should not be collapsed into a single “narco-terrorist” model. Their strategic evolution has not been identical. The PCC developed into a highly professionalized criminal enterprise with increasing reach into the formal economy, the financial sector, and political structures.
It became more disciplined, more sophisticated, and more capable of using terror selectively as part of a broader architecture of criminal power. The CV, by contrast, evolved toward a model closer to urban insurgency. It deepened its reliance on territorial domination, armed governance over densely populated communities, and paramilitary-style coercive control.
One organization increasingly resembles a criminal conglomerate with a terrorism option; the other an armed territorial order that governs through fear and confrontation.
The PCC offers one of the clearest examples in Latin America of how a prison-based gang can become a criminal-political machine. Emerging from São Paulo’s prison system in the 1990s, it expanded through hierarchy, internal discipline, financial centralization, and sophisticated command structures. Its capacity for political coercion became evident early.
In the 2000s, the PCC coordinated large-scale prison uprisings, adopted terror tactics including bomb plots, and demonstrated the ability to impose significant pressure on state authorities.
Its 2006 campaign in São Paulo, in which hundreds of attacks on public targets helped force authorities into negotiations, revealed that its violence was not merely instrumental to criminal disputes. It was designed to alter state behavior. That is the critical distinction. The PCC’s violence was not random, episodic, or purely retaliatory. It was strategic.
Over time, however, the PCC did not merely preserve its coercive capacity. It professionalized it. Mature hybrid actors do not need constant spectacular attacks once their capacity for coercion has become credible. Threat itself becomes a strategic asset. At the same time, the PCC aggressively expanded into the legal economy.
Brazilian authorities have uncovered money-laundering networks tied to the organization involving gas stations, perfume shops, financial services firms, and fintech structures that processed billions of reais in parallel banking operations.
Investigations into criminal infiltration of the fuel sector and investment funds point to a deeper reality: the PCC is no longer confined to prisons, neighborhoods, or trafficking corridors. It has penetrated the financial bloodstream of the state.
This evolution gives the PCC a strategic profile far more dangerous than that of a conventional gang. It now combines trafficking, financial capture, regulatory corruption, political contamination, and selective terror. It has become a professionalized coercive enterprise capable of shaping markets, supply chains, and public decision-making while retaining the ability to intimidate institutions when necessary.
The added concern is that this model increasingly converges with transnational illicit ecosystems beyond Brazil, including supply chains linked to chemical precursors, fuel fraud, and money laundering. That broader architecture is precisely what makes the organization relevant not only as a criminal threat, but as a hemispheric security concern.
The Comando Vermelho presents a different but equally serious challenge. Unlike the PCC, the CV is less defined by financial sophistication than by territorial sovereignty through violence. In Rio de Janeiro and in other strategic zones, it exerts influence through armed control of communities, local drug distribution, extortion, rules of conduct, and open resistance to state penetration. Police operations against the CV are increasingly framed not merely as anti-crime actions, but as efforts to contain territorial expansion by a faction capable of confronting the state directly.
The group’s reliance on armed governance, including attacks designed to prevent security forces from operating near controlled communities, reveals a structure that is not simply hiding from the state. It is contesting the state’s presence.
This is why the CV is better understood as an armed territorial order rather than as a criminal corporation in the PCC mold. It taxes, extorts, regulates access, controls local economies, and imposes behavioral rules in the areas under its control. In those environments, violence is not only a tool of profit extraction; it is a method of governance.
This becomes even more significant when viewed beyond Rio’s urban periphery. Along trafficking corridors in the Amazon, the CV has imposed regimes of fear over indigenous and riverine communities, using coercion to protect routes connecting producing countries to northern Brazilian ports.
In practice, the organization has acquired characteristics associated with urban and frontier insurgency: territorial control, coercive legitimacy within dominated spaces, organized armed force, and the ability to transform civilian areas into contested operational terrain.
The strategic implication is straightforward. A narrow definition of terrorism misses both groups, but for different reasons. It misses the PCC because it remains too fixated on ideology and fails to recognize that a profit-driven organization can still use fear, spectacular violence, and institutional coercion in terrorist ways.
It misses the CV because it assumes that territorial criminal control somehow lies outside the terrorism framework, when in reality territorial armed governance can coexist with terror tactics and insurgent features. Both organizations crossed the threshold, but they did so by different routes. The PCC through professionalized criminal-state penetration with retained coercive capacity. The CV through armed territorial domination and urban insurgent behavior.
Brazil’s domestic legal framework has struggled to adapt to this reality. The country’s anti-terrorism law was constructed around a narrower set of motivations and categories, better suited to an earlier era than to today’s hybrid criminal threats. The result has been conceptual paralysis.
Organizations capable of terrorizing cities, pressuring legislatures, controlling communities, infiltrating financial systems, and coercing state behavior are still too often treated as if they belonged to the old category of ordinary organized crime. That legal and intellectual mismatch has helped delay a more serious strategic response.
The reaction in Brazil to the U.S. designation has exposed a second problem: not only conceptual confusion, but institutional discomfort. Much of the backlash has mixed disinformation with an implicit admission of vulnerability. Claims that the designation somehow rewrites Brazilian sovereignty are false.
The designation is a sovereign U.S. decision under U.S. law. It determines how Washington treats the PCC and CV; it does not dictate how Brasília must classify them. Brazil remains free to confront—or ignore—its criminal organizations as it chooses. It is equally misleading to suggest that the designation automatically authorizes military intervention or blanket sanctions on Brazilian banks. What the reaction really reveals is anxiety that closer scrutiny of illicit financial flows may expose weaknesses in Brazil’s own compliance, anti-money-laundering, and oversight architecture.
At a moment when Brazilian authorities themselves are dismantling fraud, laundering, and fintech schemes tied to these organizations, the complaint that a foreign sovereign decision may create pressure for better enforcement reflects not a defense of sovereignty, but a reluctance to confront institutional fragility.
