South America’s most dangerous gang invades the Amazon forest
The PCC is taking over illegal gold mining in the Amazon and corrupting Indigenous cultures in a spiral of violence in some of Brazil’s most remote regions.
As darkness descended upon the isolated village, two gunshots echoed in the still grasslands. Then, a longer burst: eight shots.
Alexandre Apolinário, a leader in this Indigenous territory, said he should have known what they meant. He’d seen the arrival of the gang, with its guns and thirst for gold. He’d watched it recruit villagers, turning his people against each other. He knew the extreme violence it had brought to neighboring Indigenous lands could one day come to his own.
But when the shooting finally began this September, Apolináriostruggled to believe it. Dismissing the shots as errant hunting and reminding himself that his Macuxi people had experienced relative peace here, Apolinário finished his evening bath and sat down to rest inside his thatched roof hut.
When he opened his WhatsApp messages, he saw his optimism had been misplaced.
“There was an assassination attempt,” a community notice announced. A gunman had tried to kill an Indigenous boatman who was working with the government, then fled into the darkness. “Any outsider is a suspect.”
As the night deepened, it became clear that the attempted assassination was almost certainly the work of the PCC, one of the world’s most sprawling and feared criminal organizations. In the last two decades, even as it received scant attention in the Northern Hemisphere, the Primeiro Comando da Capital — First Capital Command — has remade South America’s underworld and grown into perhaps its most potent actor, pumping drugs across the continent and across the ocean to Europe and Africa.
By last year, according to São Paulo’s public ministry, the Brazilian gang was generating $1 billion in annual revenue, had marshaled an army of 42,000 members and become a key force fueling instability in a region where criminal organizations are increasingly posing a direct challenge to democratic institutions and state power.
The PCC is now moving into the most remote corners of the Amazon forest, where it’s expanding into environmental crime. The region, which scientists agree must be preserved to avert catastrophic global warming, has already been pushed to the brink by illegal deforestation. But the emergence of the PCC and its diversification into illegal mining and logging has deepened the biome’s peril, introducing an unpredictable new level of criminality to the Amazon.
