Brazil’s chief justice: Gang activity is a risk to Amazon sovereignty

Supreme Court Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso. Photo: Jakob Polacsek/WEF

Brazilian Supreme Court Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso told Brazilian reporters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday that Brazil “risks losing sovereignty” over the Amazon to organized crime.

“Organized crime is starting to get bolder, as recently happened in Ecuador, and to contaminate political spaces,” Justice Barroso told CNN Brasil. “We need to think of strategies to avoid organized crime getting out of control in Brazil.”

“Crime is starting to spread throughout the Amazon,” he added. “Brazil risks losing sovereignty over the Amazon not to another country but to organized crime. There we have illegal mining, illegal timber extraction, land grabbing, irregular fires, and now [the region] is becoming a route for drug trafficking”.

As The Brazilian Report has explained in the past, the so-called “Solimões route” has been heavily exploited by drug gangs that bring cocaine into Brazil from Peru via the upper portion of the Amazon River, where it is known as the Solimões River. Drugs are then sent east to Manaus and on to key ports in the North and Northeast of Brazil.

Drug trafficking in the Amazon has reached such levels that, in 2015, police in the state of Pará apprehended a 17-meter submarine believed to have been used by gangs to transport drugs.

In late 2022, police in the state of Amazonas arrested Clemilson dos Santos Farias, suspected of being the regional leader of the Red Command crime gang. Mr. Farias was nicknamed “Scrooge McDuck” because of his wealth.

The Red Command is the country’s oldest surviving organized criminal group and has been described as a “sizable national and transnational threat” by InSight Crime, a think tank that conducts research on criminal organizations.

In recent years, the Red Command has engaged in conflicts with the First Command of the Capital — a massive crime syndicate created in the state of São Paulo, which the U.S. government describes as “the most powerful organized crime group in Brazil and among the most powerful in the world.”