Organized crime spreads in the Amazon and jeopardizes forest preservation

Less than 3 kilometers from the city hall of Santana, a port city in the far north of the country, Fonte Nova Square – with its soccer field, street vendors and a small church in the background – once was a lively meeting point for residents of the second largest municipality in Amapá, 17 kilometers from the capital, Macapá. Nowadays, it is mostly empty — people avoid the place where six murders took place in two years, some in broad daylight, witnessed by children and teenagers. At the mouth of the Amazon River, Santana, the most violent city in Brazil, is located in the middle of the crossfire between two gangs from the Southeast, Rio de Janeiro’s Comando Vermelho (CV) and São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), which associate with local gangs and wage a war for territorial dominance. Unfortunately, it is not the only conflict there. Acting in the vacuum created by the absence of public power, organized crime has taken over the Amazon, multiplying the threat to the forest – essential for the planet’s biodiversity and climate balance – and corrupting Brazil’s greatest international heritage.

One of the victims of the killings in Fonte Nova Square was salesman Elielson da Cruz Lazané, 40, executed with five shots in January by a man who arrived on a motorcycle and then fled. The suspicion is that he was killed in place of a relative who, according to the police, would have links to drug trafficking. “Here we live in fear. It’s impossible to know when a bandit will show up to kill someone,” laments Rosana Lazané, 34, the seller’s sister. In addition to the omnipresent fear, Santana draws attention to its poverty. Of the 107,373 inhabitants, almost 77,000 are in the Cadastro Único Federal (Federal Single Registry), which lists low-income families, and 55,117 live on up to 218 reais per month.  As in the riverside municipalities, there are an increasing number of miserable areas of lowlands or bridges, the ‘favelas de palafitas’. It is in these areas that crime spreads, as VEJA found when following a police operation. In an alley in Baixada do Ambrósio, two years ago, Ana Júlia, 5, died hit by a bullet in the forehead, in the midst of the gangs war. “They took away the most important thing in my life. It’s a pain that doesn’t go away,” says merchant Manoel de Souza, 47, with tears in his eyes.

According to the most recent data from the Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security, Santana recorded a rate of 92.9 intentional violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, a rate four times higher than the national average (22.8). Contractor Helderson do Rosário, 43, says that his brother and stepson were hit by an Uber car that was fleeing from the police, with two bandits inside. Already on the ground, the two were executed by Military Police. “Here there is the violence of crime and that of the police,” he says. In 2023, in fact, the state was the record holder for deaths in police actions. “We do not deny that there are problems, but we are concentrating efforts on solving them,” says Amapá’s Secretary of Security, José Rodrigues Neto, who doubled the number of personnel in Santana (24 men/day) and has carried out frequent operations in the city. Although the data are still high in the area — thirty violent deaths in the first half of the year, 25 linked to trafficking — there has already been a drop of 52% compared to 2023.

The expansion of banditry in municipalities like Santana puts at risk the very preservation of the largest biome on the planet and, by extension, of Brazil’s strategic position on the global agenda. “The future of the Amazon is more threatened than ever,” warns Renato Sérgio de Lima, director of the Brazilian Forum on Public Security. “PCC and CV have become real ‘holding companies’ in the region.” With a continental dimension and problems in the same proportion, the Legal Amazon (Amazonas, Acre, Rondônia, Roraima, Pará, Maranhão, Amapá, Tocantins and Mato Grosso) is an open field for the opportunistic expansion of drug trafficking, which has crossed the border and controls localities in Bolivia and Colombia. “In the forest, the law of the strongest prevails. Violent and with financial power, the gangs see there a chance to accumulate capital,” says geographer Thiago Sabino, from the Instituto Mãe Crioula.

The list of illicit businesses run by the gangs goes far beyond drug trafficking. There are records of its work in illegal mining, logging, land grabbing and animal trafficking, among other pests that plague the territory. According to the study Cartographies of Violence in the Amazon, 59% of the population — 15.4 million people — live in areas under the control of criminals. In all, 22 groups, including Brazilians, Bolivians, Colombians and Venezuelans, operate in the Amazon, although the dominance of the members of the CV in Rio de Janeiro and the PCC in São Paulo is notorious: the mark of one or the other, sometimes of both, is engraved in 168 of the 178 cities dominated by bandits. Eighty others are disputed, under frequent executions and shootouts — among them, Santana. “Alongside the new businesses, the exploitation of drugs in retail and the search for new international routes for trafficking continue to advance,” observes sociologist Rodrigo Chagas, from UFRR.

The first impression, when stepping into the most violent city in the country, is that it is a common place, unattractive and punished by disorderly growth. For the gangs, however, it occupies a strategic position, centered on the Port of Santana, the gateway to and from the Amazon region, little inspected until recently. Capable of receiving large freighters and located at the point where Brazil is closest to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States, the port has the potential to become a distribution center for cocaine, skank (more potent marijuana), weapons, and gold — in 2023 alone its movement grew by 48.1%. Another attraction for traffickers and smugglers is the fact that the port area is full of smaller boats coming from all over the Amazon, which makes it difficult to control. “Police operations are punctual and I have no power to inspect passengers and luggage. But it is known that there are a lot of ‘mules’ with drugs here,” says Jacqueline Andritson, administrator of a passenger terminal through which 2,000 people pass through a day.

The trigger for the spread of organized gangs in the Amazon was the murder, in 2016, of drug trafficker Jorge Rafaat, who controlled the so-called “caipira route” (Paraguay-Bolivia-Brazil) and supplied the CV and the PCC with much of the drug sold in the country. The São Paulo gang hurried to take Rafaat’s place and the CV from Rio de Janeiro headed north, with an eye on the “Solimões route”, powered by boats that leave from the triple border Brazil-Peru-Colombia. The division of areas did not last long — soon the PCC began to advance towards the second route and, three years ago, accelerated the pace, motivated by the overproduction of cocaine in Colombia and the weakening of the fight against environmental crimes under Bolsonaro. It was during this period that criminals, bothered by the suspicions raised by the indigenist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips about their business in the region, hired killers to take the lives of the two, in a crime that reverberated around the world. “There has been a transformation of crime here. Before, could go anywhere. Now, we are received with bullets,” says Rodrigo Agostinho, president of Ibama. “The crimes overlap. We are going after gold and we find drugs,” he adds.

The confiscation of high-value goods and frequent bloodbaths have exposed the activities of gangs in the Amazon in recent months. In June 2023, fourteen people were killed in the Yanomami Indigenous Land, in Roraima — an area dominated by PCC — including four bandits who set up an ambush to attack a Highway Police and Ibama aircraft. Also last year, from the largest seizure of gold in the history of Amazonas – 47 kilos, valued at 14.9 million reais – the Federal Police reached members of CV entangled in the illicit extraction of minerals in the state and in Pará.

In parallel with the intertwining of crimes, banditry sophisticates its methods. In April, police officers from Amapá and the PF seized 154 kilograms of cocaine hidden by divers in the hull of a cargo ship that was going to leave Santana for Europe. It is estimated that the amounts moved with drug trafficking in the country, per year, correspond to 4% of the GDP. Illegally harvested timber, added to that of Central Africa and Southeast Asia, generates 100 billion dollars annually. “It is evident that the crime uses ghost companies to launder money and uses the connivance of authorities,” says PF superintendent Alexandre Saraiva, exonerated from a post in the Amazon for denouncing irregularities in the management of former Minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles.

With 7 million square kilometers, 60% in Brazil, the Amazon sees crime spread its tentacles. Apart from Manaus and Macapá, where it disputes territory with PCC, CV controls alone and practically without restrictions most of the capitals in the region – including Belém, which will host, in 2025, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, COP30. “Gangs use the logic of the mafia: where there is crime, they have to dominate,” explains prosecutor Muller Marques Siqueira. In the capital of Pará, more than half of the 1.5 million inhabitants live in favelas — the city is a record holder in this type of agglomeration. VEJA visited some of them and found that, unlike in the Southeast, there are almost no armed security guards at the entrances, but the movement of “strangers” is monitored step by step by motorcycle couriers. “The presence of CV began to be perceived here in 2014, and today it has a monopoly on trafficking,” says sociologist Roberto Magno, a researcher at UEPA’s Laboratory of the Geography of Violence.

PCC, in turn, advances through the south of Pará and both gangs contribute abundantly to the degradation of the forest – last year, the report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) dedicated an entire chapter to the connection of banditry with environmental damage in the Amazon. Another survey, by Greenpeace, showed that, in the first half of the year alone, 417 hectares of deforestation — 584 soccer fields — were recorded in Kayapó, Munduruku and Yanomami lands, all under the influence of drug traffickers. In order to curb crime, new PRF directorates, the federal railway and waterway police, will be created. The initiative joins the government’s AMAS plan, for prevention and inspection of the region, with 2 billion reais of investment. “Combating the advance of organized crime is our priority,” said Humberto Barros, director of the Federal Police’s Amazon and Environment. An essential — and urgent — step so that the largest environmental reserve on the planet does not become a no-man’s land.