Armored vehicles roar through the narrow alleys. Rifle bullets crack due to intense crossfire. Helicopters and weaponized drones firing from above. Soldiers in military uniform engaged in violent combat. Bodies strewn across the bloody streets.
These may be scenes from a combat zone. But on October 28, they took place not on a desolate battlefield, but on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, a postcard city known for its breathtaking coastline and vibrant bossa nova music scene.
In the “containment operation,” 2,500 police officers, soldiers and snipers climbed the slopes of Rio’s Complexo da Peña and Complexo do Alemão favelas, home to about 110,000 people.
Their target was the Commando Vermelho (CV), or Red Command, a criminal organization that had controlled these hillside slums for decades. During the operation, at least 117 armed suspects and four police officers were killed, and about 100 people were arrested. Authorities said they seized 118 weapons, including 91 rifles and 14 explosives, and 1 ton of drugs.
The raids followed a year-long investigation into the Red Army headquarters, prompted in part by the gang’s expansion into new territories, a recent spike in violence, and authorities’ efforts to reassert state control.
Officials called the attack a success. However, at least 121 people were killed, with initial reports putting the death toll at 132, and the operation drew harsh criticism from local and international human rights groups. It also exposed deep rifts over how to confront Brazil’s powerful organized crime syndicates.
Taina de Medeiros, who has lived in Complexo da Peña for 35 years, said: “This is not the first time I see blood being shed for the ‘greater good’.” “But this ‘good thing’ never comes.”
Now a community organizer and member of an anti-violence group active in the favelas, Medeiros is well aware of how the Red Army command instills fear in its territory. “As I walk around, I see people on every street corner with big rifles and standing by the door with grenades and pistols,” he says. “No one feels safe and there is always a precarious risk that another operation like this will take place.”
Rafael Alkadipani, a member of the Brazilian Security Forum, a non-profit civil society group, said gangs “also decide who can enter and operate in the community.” “For example, internet companies have to pay to provide service in an area. They issue permits to people to build homes, not the government.”
Increased violence, weapons use, and gang control in favelas are making it increasingly difficult for government officials and police to access these areas.
“When the state abandons these communities, gangs gain more control,” Alkadipani said.
Brazilian criminal organizations have also expanded their reach from the illicit economy to politics through methods such as vote buying, violence, intimidation, and financing of political candidates, helping them grow into one of the most powerful gangs in South America, as research and police investigations have revealed.
Luis Lima, a right-wing congressman who represents Rio, defended the October 28 attack as inevitable.
“This was a necessary surgery,” Lima told CNN. “What happened that day, the murder of 117 criminals, happens every day in Brazil. Last year there were more than 38,000 murders, which translates to 106 deaths per day,” he said.
Lima claimed that the public supports a tougher stance and that the majority of favela residents support the operation.
“The people living there are being extorted,” he said. “Their shops are being robbed and women are being raped by traffickers. It’s intolerable.”
However, Daniela Fichino, vice president of the human rights group Global Justice, condemns the “national policy of defining the entire population as disposable.” He added: “Brazil does not have the death penalty, yet the state acts as if it does, while at the same time discovering, prosecuting and executing young, black and poor residents under the banner of security.”
As a result, “the wars repeat themselves forever, reinforcing the very criminal structures they claim to dismantle,” Ficino said.
The debate over durable solutions reveals the complexity of how criminal organizations have become so powerful and have penetrated nearly every layer of Brazilian society over time.
The Red Legion was established in 1979 inside the Candido Mendez prison, an island prison off the coast of Rio. There, common criminals were imprisoned along with left-wing political prisoners opposed to Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. In the harsh conditions there, what began as an informal alliance for protection quickly became an organized network.
One of the founders, William da Silva Lima, was convicted of armed robbery, extortion, and kidnapping and spent more than 30 years in prison. In prison, he acted as an advocate for other inmates and negotiated with authorities.
In his 2010 book, da Silva Lima details how the dire conditions inside 19th-century Candido Méndez, long known among prisoners as the “cauldron of hell,” prompted them to organize resistance, the origins of the Red Army Command, and his role in the creation of Brazil’s organized crime group.
Da Silva Lima writes that once political prisoners were released in 1979, members of what was then called the Falange Vermelha, or Red Phalanx, began organizing mass prison breaks and investing in the burgeoning cocaine trade.
By 1985, the Red Army command controlled approximately 70 percent of all drug outlets in Rio, beginning a dangerous turf war over the city with other factions.
Although the Red Command is Brazil’s oldest faction, it is not the largest, said Marcio Sergio Cristino, a criminal prosecutor in São Paulo state and author of a book on gangs, although recent expansion shows it is aiming to achieve that goal. The main obstacle, he said, is not the police or the government, but competing factions that are larger, better organized and highly influential in South America.
The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), or First Capitalo Command, is a criminal organization created in 1993 that also has its origins in a prison, Taubate Prison in São Paulo. The founders were survivors of the Qalandir massacre the previous year, in which 111 prisoners were killed by the gendarmerie.
It was not until February 2001 that the group revealed its full extent. In what became known as the “Great Rebellion,” PCC members coordinated simultaneous uprisings in 29 prisons. Approximately 27,000 prisoners were involved, and at least 16 people, including prisoners and police officers, were killed and 77 injured. At the end of the 27-hour uprising, PCC flags – black and white, some with handmade signs reading “Peace and Justice” – were flown throughout São Paulo’s prisons. The message was clear. The country has lost control.
“Initially, their focus was… to control the prison environment,” Cristino explained. “Then they started to grow and organize, and one of their main pillars became drug dealing.”
To obtain a supply of higher quality cocaine, PCC expanded into Brazil’s border states with Bolivia and Paraguay, two major sources of cocaine in South America. With the U.S. market already dominated by Mexico and Colombia, the deal comes as landlocked Bolivian cocaine producers focus on expanding into Europe.
“Bolivia has agreed to sell only to PCC,” Cristino said. “In return, PCC was responsible for transportation, logistics and sales to Europe, Africa and other regions.”
Until then, the Red Command and the PCC were not enemies. But their fragile coexistence fell apart when the Red Army command, cut off from Bolivia, turned to Peru and set up a cocaine trade that operated almost entirely within Brazil. Notably, this gang has come to control supply routes through the northern part of the country, using the Amazon region’s major rivers and their tributaries.
Competition for these routes has led to a series of prison riots and massacres across northern Brazil, Cristino said.
“If you look at the riots, dozens and even hundreds of people died, and even cannibalism, it was all about Root,” he says. “It was a territorial war.”
The syndicates are now expanding into other criminal areas, competing for control of Brazil’s highways, rivers and prisons.
According to a 2025 study by the Brazilian Public Security Forum, gangs such as Red Command and PCC generated 146.8 billion Brazilian reals ($27 billion) in 2022 through the illegal trade of gold, fuel, alcohol and tobacco. This is almost 10 times the estimated 15 billion reais ($2.8 billion) from cocaine trafficking.
They are also involved in money laundering, laundering billions of reais in illicit profits by investing in construction companies, transport companies, fuel distributors and even the cryptocurrency market.
Inside the Command Center: The Battle in Progress
According to an investigation by Rio de Janeiro’s Public Ministry, gang leaders continue to issue orders from behind bars through encrypted messages, letters and encrypted apps.
Cristino said high-risk inmates are isolated in individual cells, but the flow of information never truly stops. “There is no such thing as absolute isolation,” he says. “Cellphones still come in, but even when they don’t, messages get through lawyers and visitors. There’s always a way.”
“Intelligence units are working closely with other security forces and the judiciary to monitor inmates associated with the sect,” the Federal Regional Prisons Office said in a statement to CNN. The office says they determine inmates’ positions within the hierarchy and work to isolate leaders “so that they cannot issue orders.”
Despite these measures, investigators acknowledge that Brazil’s prisons remain the command and communication hub for the country’s largest criminal organizations, a contradiction the country is struggling to contain.
“The country’s militarized response will only strengthen factions,” al-Qadipani said. “Dozens of people die in each operation, but the leadership remains. For every death, another person fills the void. …What we have now is a reactive, never-ending war.”
“We were trying to set up a partnership with UNICEF” to help young people in the favelas enter the job market, said community organizer Medeiros. A career fair was scheduled for the day after the deadly operation in Rio’s favelas. “We had to cancel everything,” he told CNN.
“Honestly, I was thinking today about finalizing the details for that great day,” he said. “Instead, we were cleaning bodies off the streets. And now we’re preparing for what’s next.”
