The War Against Organized Crime

It’s election year in Brasil, and as usual, the question of public security is high on the political agenda. In the battle for hearts and minds, the far-right promises to bring law and order to the streets and to crack down hard on ‘organised crime’, a term that it reserves for criminal factions within predominantly black working-class communities on the urban periphery. This association between class, race and crime bothers me. Whilst there is no doubt about the destabilising influence of São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando Capital and Rio’s Comando Vermelho, organisations armed with military grade weapons who are actively engaged in extortion, money laundering, and the international trafficking of both drugs and arms, there is equally no question about the corrosive effects of white-collar criminal conspiracy. In this shady alternative universe, in which the distinction between elected politicians, finance capital, and gangsterism is blurred, organised crime is clearly not just the territory of the marginalised working-class. It is a terrain that is shared with the business and political elite whose persistent criminal activity involving the theft of staggering amounts of money leaves much of the population bewildered and disillusioned.  This year alone the Federal Police has launched two major investigations into white collar crime. The first involves the brazen robbery of  the State Pension fund. The second concerns the massive financial fraud at Banco Master, a scandal that directly implicates Cláudio Castro the ex-Governor of Rio de Janeiro. Ally of the Bolsonaro clan and suspected of involvement in the embezzlement of three billion Reais of public money, this is the same Castro who in October 2025 declared war against organised crime in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão favella. It resulted in one of the worst massacres in recent Brasilian history. Squadrons of battle-ready military police ripped through the community firing at will in an operation that cost the lives of five officers and one hundred and twenty-two citizens. Whilst the attack placated the elite’s thirst for retribution, it did nothing to alleviate the misery of residents caught in the crossfire or to arrest the cancer of organised crime that sadly continues to permeate all levels of Brasilian society.