Brazil considers the so-called Red Command (CV) and First Capital Command (PCC) the two most powerful organized crime groups operating in the South American nation.
The CV and PCC came to life from within prison walls, and both were designated terrorist organizations by the United States on Thursday.
- Red Command -
A facility on the Ilha Grande island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro gave birth to the CV in the 1970s, a result of collaboration between ordinary inmates and imprisoned guerrillas fighting the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985.
But ideological aspirations soon gave way to drug-trafficking -- first in Rio, then in other parts of Brazil.
In the late 1990s, the CV began negotiating directly with Colombian and Bolivian cartels to procure cocaine.
In recent years, the group has tightened its grip on Rio's favelas, to the dismay of other criminal organizations operating in the impoverished neighborhoods.
- First Capital Command -
A football team in Taubate prison near Sao Paulo gave rise to the PCC in the 1990s.
At first, the group sought to improve detention conditions, especially after the Carandiru massacre of 1992 when 111 people died during a police intervention in a prison.
The PCC orchestrated an unprecedented wave of violence in 2006, attacking police stations and causing hundreds of deaths in just a few weeks in Sao Paulo.
The bloodshed was in retaliation for the transfer of some of its members to a maximum-security prison.
Just like the CV, the PCC made its money trafficking cocaine.
It runs a particularly lucrative scheme in partnership with the Italian mafia 'Ndrangheta, shipping drugs produced in South America to Europe from Brazilian ports.
It has also used the formal economy to build an extensive network for laundering drug-trafficking profits.
- Clashes -
The PCC and CV initially coexisted peacefully, but everything changed around a decade ago during a power struggle over drugs coming from the regions bordering major cocaine producers Colombia and Bolivia.
In early 2017, bloody clashes between PCC members and CV-allied factions in northern Brazilian prisons killed dozens of inmates.
Major police operations targeted the two groups last year.
In October, about 2,500 officers raided two CV-controlled favela complexes in Rio.
More than 120 people died, making the raid the deadliest in Brazil's history.
A police operation in August aimed to hurt the PCC financially by a dismantling vast money-laundering network working out of gas stations.
Banking and insurance start-ups were also implicated in the scheme, and a new phase of the operation occurred on Thursday.
AFP
