Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  “It was a good time full of dreams of independence,” he writes in his memoir. “This strong desire for independence is perhaps what led me to a place behind bars.”1

  William’s young criminality comes across as innocent compared to the gangbangers of today. He smiles proudly at how he deftly pinched wallets from businessmen in their 1950s overcoats. The new generation of teenagers talk about firefights and cutting off heads.

  But William still got himself locked up. Police finally nabbed him for picking pockets when he was seventeen, and he had his first taste of incarceration. After four days, his father signed a paper promising to take care of him but then left him angrily on the street. William went back to thieving, drifting from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro.

  Brazil’s seaside city was in its glamorous days of carnivals and bossa nova made famous by the 1960s hit “The Girl from Ipanema.” William was a young hood in this mix, picking pockets, mugging, and robbing houses. It didn’t take too long for him to get arrested again, this time for burglary. He had just turned nineteen so was no longer a minor, and a judge gave him five years, plunging him into the jungle of Brazil’s prisons.

  From the outside, scarred-up tattooed prisoners look terrifying. But from the inside, they are often the ones who are frightened. Being a prisoner is one of the weakest positions you can be in as a human, your basic decisions out of your hands, at the mercy of guards and inmates. Prison is a necessary evil to protect society. But all prisons are hard; and Brazilian prisons are hellish.

  Brazil is a progressive society in many ways. But if you take Dostoyevsky’s adage that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” then Brazil comes across as barbaric. Its jails suffer bitter overcrowding in dilapidated buildings and extreme violence, including decapitations, and the constant threat of male rape.2

  Bad prisons are a feature of most Latin American countries. Too much violent crime translates to too many violent prisoners, alongside poor budgets to deal with them. As Brazil is such a big country, it has one of the biggest prison populations on the planet, with more than half a million inmates; the penitentiary system is a world in itself. This means it has the region’s highest overall number of violent offenders, and these end up concentrated in certain notorious penitentiaries. One of them is Bangu in Rio. This is where William was sent as a slight nineteen-year-old.

  When William arrived he found prisoners divided and powerless. The main reason he would later form the commando was to put order among the inmates. But when he first came in, he had no gang to back him up. Prisoners slapped him, and he hit back. He may have been small, but he had nerves. “I am not a violent person,” he says. “But I don’t like being hurt.”

  One warden earned the nickname “Hit You While Weeping,” because he loved to beat prisoners while they cried. (It might surprise us, but tough guys do cry. And jails are full of tears.) One day when Hit You While Weeping was thumping him, William snapped and struck back. As a punishment, he got his first taste of the solitary confinement cells.

  “Do you know what they are like? Can you imagine what it’s like to live in them?” he writes.

  At first, I couldn’t eat anything as water only came every twelve hours, and urine and shit accumulated in such quantity that it destroyed your appetite …

  Looking at yourself in the mirror, shaving, distinguishing smells and colors, all this disappears after a while and you replace it with other things to survive. One of them was to hold your right hand up high, and keep it clean, so you can use it for eating, and you keep the left hand for all the other tasks. It is a question of hygiene …

  The first nights, I didn’t sleep, as I was walking from right to left, singing to hasten the dawn and the coffee. If the warden was one of the vicious ones there would be no food just a volley of blows. There is nothing left but for you to die, retch, or become completely mad!

  The beatings are not too serious though, because between two strokes of the nightstick, the back relaxes.3

  CHAPTER 8

  In 1964, during William’s first long prison stretch, an event took place that would drastically change the young robber’s life: The army launched its coup.

  Governing South America’s largest country, Brazil’s military dictatorship became a reference point for Latin American dictatorships of the era, influencing other regimes, such as those that took power in Argentina and Chile. The generals invented what they called a “Doctrine of National Security” justifying their rule. It wasn’t that sophisticated; if they felt the nation was in enough trouble from inflation, strikes, and unrest, they argued they could kick out the elected government and take over. Chile’s Commander in Chief Augusto Pinochet and Argentina’s General Leopoldo Galtieri ate up this thinking.

  The generals made their move in an era when the U.S. government was particularly worried (or paranoid?) about the spread of communism. This fear was put on steroids by the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The following month, the CIA released a report entitled “Castro’s Subversive Capabilities in Latin America.” The moth-bitten document with SECRET stamped on it has now been declassified. It names almost every country in the region as a potential target of Cuban and Soviet infiltration. But it singles out Brazil. “Brazil, where communists have penetrated the government and military to some limited extent, the tide of nationalist and anti-US feeling is strong, and depressed socio-economic conditions and inefficient government administration provide Castro many opportunities.”1

  The infiltrated government it referred to was led by President João Goulart, a Catholic farm boy from southern Brazil who took office in 1961. Goulart was known popularly as Jango, in the Brazilian spirit of referring to politicians informally like soccer players. (Lula, Dilma alongside Pele, Ronaldo.) There is still debate about how radical Jango was. His proponents say he was a center leftist like those who would rule Brazil four decades later. His adversaries claim he was a Castro in sheep’s clothing.

  Jango launched a massive literacy campaign, which was sorely needed in Brazil, if reminiscent of a program in Havana. And he made powerful enemies. To alleviate millions of landless peasants, he expropriated large nonproductive plots, angering old plantation families. Foreign corporations were enraged by a tax reform that hit companies with headquarters abroad. He also spearheaded a campaign for a nuclear-free Latin America, presenting the U.N. General Assembly with a draft resolution.2 The Pentagon saw this as a threat to its defenses.

  The Brazilian generals moved against Jango in March 1964. Documents declassified in 2004 confirm allegations that the U.S. backed the coup. The U.S. ambassador of the moment, Lincoln Gordon, wrote in a cable that the CIA was “giving covert support for street rallies … and encouragement (of) democratic and anti-communist sentiment in Congress, armed forces, friendly labor and student groups, church, and business.”3

  But the real juice is a recorded phone conversation between Ambassador Gordon and President Lyndon Johnson at his Texas ranch. The audio in the National Security Archive allows us to hear the entire conversation, listening to plotting from the heart of power.

  In the briefing, Gordon tells the president how U.S. Navy ships are sailing from Aruba to the Brazilian coast to back up the generals. The U.S. commander in chief grunts his approval. “I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do,” Johnson says. “I’d get right on top of it and stick my neck out a little.”4

  These Cold War politics aren’t worth getting too worked up about now. It is a debate of the last century, its physical and ideological battles largely history. The American government and secret services did what they believed was right to stop the spread of authoritarian communism, and in the process supported violent dictators and sustained wars. The cold warriors claim the final result—the Soviet Union collapsing—vindicated their efforts. Others argue blood was spilled in vain and the advent of democracy delayed.

  But whether it was right or wrong,
we need to look at how the Cold War played out in Latin America to understand crime families like the Red Commando. The gangster militias took life during these ideological conflicts, often under dictatorships, before becoming more deadly and uncontrollable in the era of democracy. We need to understand this move from Cold War to crime wars.

  Following the coup, a first wave of political prisoners flooded the jails. These were not the leftist guerrillas, who would arrive later, but a mix of trade unionists, soldiers, and sailors sympathetic to ousted President Jango.

  The political prisoners’ talk of struggle and repression touched a nerve for William, and he became close to them. He was drawn to how they read, and borrowed books, starting a long love affair with literature. He adored the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha and his famous story of the War of Canudos, Rebellion in the Backlands. In the book, Cunha expresses sympathy for the wild-eyed rebels and paints the modern republic as being as barbaric as those it crushed. These ideas added to William’s vision of a world divided into a repressive system, and a struggling, if faulted, underclass fighting for freedom.

  A love of reading is a trait shared by criminal bosses across the Americas. Another Brazilian capo known as Marcola is said to have read three thousand books in prison, while the Mexican drug lord Nazario “The Maddest One” Moreno was a keen reader and writer (of his own bible). Other kingpins have a higher level of education than many in their armies of assassins. Jamaican crime lord Dudus Coke was studious in high school and said to be studying for a law degree at the time of his arrest. The capos generally come from bad areas, but they become the better educated within those areas. Some form of education, it seems, can be a trait that helps these kingpins rise.

  When William was released from prison, he decided to move up in the world; he went from robbing wallets to robbing banks.

  I wanted to live better as fast as possible. I had finished with stealing wallets, doing little thefts, mugging passersby. I left prison and decided to go to banks, armed with a gun to find the money that I needed. I would never get it through a normal job, that of a slave. Of course there were risks, but I was ready to take them. Prison had made me a professional criminal.5

  Psychologists would call William a habitual criminal. It’s hard to argue against that case. But he doesn’t fit into the psychological profiles made of these repeat offenders. He’s not of low intelligence, he is sociable and charismatic, and he doesn’t appear naturally violent.

  But he was a natural rebel. I wonder if he was looking for revenge for his mother and grandfather whom he saw beaten by police. Or had he become so used to prison he craved to be behind bars, another phenomenon recognized by psychologists? Or did he love the adrenaline of running in with a gun and asking for the loot?

  Whatever his motive, it was a good time to be robbing banks in Brazil. Between 1968 and 1973, Brazil enjoyed its economic miracle, with growth of up to 14 percent a year. Rio was the financial heartland, before the big banks moved to São Paulo, and there were sacks of money to pilfer. William was one of the most reckless stickup artists stealing them.

  This economic boom didn’t improve everyone’s lives. A small group of businessmen favored by the dictatorship got the lion’s share. So while the country was getting richer it was also becoming more unequal. This spurred opposition, and paradoxically, as the economy grew, so did armed rebellion.

  By the late sixties, Brazil’s guerrillas became a significant force fighting the military regime. They were encouraged by the era’s global revolts: in Prague, rebels stood in front of Soviet tanks; in Berkeley, rebels protested Vietnam; and in Brazil, rebels shot at soldiers.

  Like in many insurgencies, several guerrilla groups formed and splintered, creating an alphabet soup of cells with interchanging members. The largest was the Revolutionary Movement 8th October, known as MR8. Members of the Brazilian Communist Party founded it, citing the day that Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia in 1967. As the name suggests, they were inspired by Guevara and his Cuban revolution.

  However, while Cuban rebels defeated the weak Batista regime and took power, Brazilian insurgents were never able to fight open warfare against the generals. Most Brazilian opposition remained peaceful, and only a few thousand took up guns. They became a classic urban guerrilla outfit. They couldn’t control territory like Cuban rebels, but moved around clandestine safe houses and launched sporadic attacks.

  The guerrillas hailed overwhelmingly from the ranks of students and intellectuals. Their most famous member was code name Estela, who was none other than Brazil’s current president Dilma Rousseff. Another, Franklin de Sousa Martins, would go on to become a press officer for President Lula. And another, Fernando Gabeira, would join the Green Party, win a seat in parliament, and run for mayor of Rio.

  Gabeira gained notoriety for two actions. The first was being photographed on Ipanema Beach wearing a purple women’s G-string. The picture gave him a lot of cred with young voters when he ran for mayor. This is a revolutionary, Brazilian style. The second was kidnapping the U.S. ambassador in MR8’s most notorious operation in 1969.

  The kidnapping of Ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick was one of the biggest Cold War attacks on U.S. officials in Latin America. It later got made into the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film Four Days in September. Elbrick was a sixty-one-year-old foreign-service veteran who had served in Poland during World War II, followed by Yugoslavia, where he dealt with Tito. He was in Brazil fifty-seven days when he was nabbed.

  His wife, Elvira, recounts the abduction in detail.6 She describes how they were delighted to leave communist Eastern Europe for South America, looking forward to carnivals and Copacabana. Two months in, Elvira was getting ready for a charity event selling Levi’s jeans and cupcakes, when her secretary said that her husband had been kidnapped.

  “What! We just had lunch together,” I said. “When?” And she said, “About three minutes after he entered his limousine to go back to his office.”

  He was caught on a side street, intercepted by a Volkswagen, and they dragged the chauffeur out of the limousine and tore out the telephone, put a tarpaulin on Burke in the back of the car … Then they went on and on and on for quite a long time—close to two hours—and later Burke told me that he had read enough of Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock to know that sometimes by hearing you could judge where you were going.

  Elbrick realized they were driving into the mountains. The MR8 guerrillas dragged him out to a ranch where Gabeira was waiting, sat him on a stool, and gave him a book of Ho Chi Minh to read. Then they questioned him all night.

  He felt they were going to shoot him on the spot. He didn’t know what they were going to do, so he resisted which he shouldn’t have done. That’s when they beat him terribly on the head. So he was all night long being quizzed about nothing that he could answer. He knew nothing about the country …

  But they began to treat him all right really and then he could communicate. He said, “Why do you rely on violence with an innocent victim like myself knowing nothing about your country, or your politics? I’ve just arrived here and violence doesn’t pay.” And they said, “Well, because the government won’t listen to us.”

  President Richard Nixon had sent Elbrick to Brazil. But according to Elvira, Nixon left him out in the cold, refusing to intervene. Luckily, the Brazilian regime itself negotiated a settlement, handing over political prisoners, and Elbrick was released after four days.

  Elbrick suffered seventy-five stitches in his head and underwent ten operations over the following decade. Two years after his treatment was finished, he died of pneumonia, age seventy-five. Following his death, Elvira managed to catch up with Nixon at a funeral.

  I said, “Do you happen to recall a man by the name of Burke Elbrick?” And he said, “Oh, yes. I appointed him as ambassador to Brazil.”

  And I said, “Do you remember that he was kidnapped down there and that you were his Judas and his Pontius Pilate?” And I said, “Goodbye, Mr. Watergate,” an
d walked away.

  While Nixon left his ambassador in the lurch, the U.S. government supported Brazil’s military dictatorship as it killed and tortured. The Brazilian military junta was a long way from a Stalin or Hitler regime that murdered millions. But it was a repressive dictatorship. A truth commission determined that during its rule, police and soldiers murdered or forcibly disappeared up to five hundred people. They tortured and imprisoned many more, and thousands went into exile.

  A declassified U.S. State Department memo describes this torture in graphic detail. The torturers, it explains, used classic Brazilian techniques such as electric shocks from cattle prods and the pau de arara, in which prisoners hang by their arms and legs from a metal bar. The memo also depicts new techniques that its author finds interesting as they inflict maximum pain while leaving minimum marks.

  If the suspect does not confess, and if it is believed that he is withholding valuable information, he is subjected to increasingly painful physical and mental duress until he confesses. He is placed nude in a small dark room with a metal floor through which an electrical current is pulsated. The shock felt by the individual, though reportedly light in intensity, is constant and eventually becomes almost impossible to withstand. The suspect is usually kept in this room for several hours. He may then be transferred to several other “special effects” rooms in which devices are used to instill fear and physical discomfort. Extreme mental and physical fatigue sometimes results, especially if the person undergoes such treatment for two or three days. All during this time, he is not allowed food or water.7

  Among those who suffered this agony was the young Dilma, alias Estela. She was arrested at age twenty-two and jailed for three years. When she later became president, she recalled the torture of her youth. “The interrogation started, generally with electric shocks, growing in intensity, and then there were sessions of pau de arara,” she remembered. “My jaw was dislocated. That still causes me problems until today.” These wounds, she said, “are a part of me.”8