🤔 How people misread Brazil's gangs

In recent weeks, US terrorist designations have drawn international attention to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC), and with it a familiar reflex: foreign analysts reaching for the frameworks they already know. 

The PCC is described as Brazil's answer to the Sinaloa Cartel, or as a South American mafia. The comparisons are not so much wrong as incomplete — and the gap between what the PCC is and how it is categorized abroad is where policy fails.

I spent more than two decades investigating the PCC from inside São Paulo's organized crime and narcotics units. Over time, one lesson became unavoidable: what matters most about the PCC is not how much cocaine it moves. It is how it…

Don’t miss out! Upgrade to unlock full access. The process takes only seconds with Apple Pay or Stripe. Become a member.

We’re here for readers who want to truly understand Brazil and Latin America — a region too often ignored or misrepresented by the international media.

Since 2017, our reporting has been powered by paid subscribers. They’re the reason we can keep a full-time team of journalists across Brazil and Argentina, delivering sharp, independent coverage every day.

If you value our work, subscribing is the best way to keep it going — and growing.

You're already a subscriber — which means you've made a choice. You decided that understanding Brazil, accurately and ahead of the headlines, was worth paying for. Thank you. That choice is the reason we exist.

Every contribution above your subscription goes directly into journalism: the reporters and editors on the ground in São Paulo, Brasília, and Rio who file what parachute correspondents and recycled-wire intelligence simply can't. It's the difference between covering 2026 and covering it the way it deserves to be covered.

If The Brazilian Report has earned a place in how you read the country, consider giving beyond what you already pay. Whatever the amount, it funds the work — and it keeps it independent.