The Wall Street Journal published a report on Monday (20) reporting how the criminal faction Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) emerged, grew in Brazil and now influences global cocaine trafficking. The newspaper highlighted the arrests of people involved with the group in the United States and their links with drug smuggling to Europe.
With the title “How a Brazilian prison gang became a global power in cocaine trafficking”, the WSJ tells about the emergence of the PCC from within the Brazilian prison system in 1993 and its structuring over the years. The newspaper treats the faction’s operation today as that of a “crime multinational” structured in the style of a company.
“Unlike Mexican drug traffickers, heavily armed Colombian militias or the big bosses of the Red Command in Rio, members of the PCC have a discreet and business profile, seeking fortune and not fame — escaping the gratuitous violence that attracts the police and television”, points out the publication.
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Other passages show how the PCC was structured internally in the form of departments to achieve specific objectives such as territorial expansion, global actions, finance. The group’s infiltration of legal markets to launder money is also mentioned.
According to the report, the PCC is already in thirty countries and American authorities have found members of the group in states such as Florida, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Tennessee. It is in Europe, however, where the group has established its main market.
The WSJ shows how the group joined the Italian mafia to achieve a large-scale distribution channel for cocaine within Europe. While the PCC supplies the drug, the group manages to sell it for a difference of more than 10 times the value negotiated on the border with Bolivia.
One of the drug routes to the European continent involves the use of countries in Africa, such as Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, as warehouses for storing drugs. Portugal is one of the entry points, where the group would have established a structured money laundering and logistics operation.
