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

by Ioan Grillo

  Another command, number two, repeats an adage of wisdom of seasoned criminals by simply saying, “Don’t trust anybody.”

  Such rules don’t constitute an ideology. But they are a code of values. And that is perhaps the best way to describe the Red Commando; it’s an honor code to regulate criminals within a community.

  Rules can also attract members. If an organization has a pamphlet, however banal, it spreads word of the group, makes it more “official.” Many teenagers with a lack of direction are drawn to something that gives a sense of inclusion and purpose.

  William’s glorious freedom of dancing at favela parties and robbing banks was short-lived. After the spree of heists, bank owners put pressure on police to round up the gang leaders. The Red Commando was also a victim of its own success, William moans, as every holdup was blamed on them, even ones that they didn’t do. And police officers claimed any two-bit criminal they arrested was a Red Commando member.

  The heat put William on top of the wanted list, his photo drilled into the minds of police officers. He was safe in the favela, where he could hide and people wouldn’t inform. But he made the mistake of going downtown. Police recognized him and nabbed him after ten months on the lam.

  Other commando bosses met a bloodier fate, with police gunning to take them out for good. A leader called Nanai escaped Ilha Grande to a waiting car on the coast. A police helicopter followed him and alerted officers who shot him dead at the wheel of a black Volkswagen Bug.

  A few months later, William’s bank-robbing buddy Joe Mustache was cornered in a block of apartments. Four hundred police surrounded him, but Mustache kept his ground and fired from the windows like the finale of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The standoff lasted hours, allowing reporters to broadcast the siege live on the radio. Four hundred policemen versus one desperado. Saldanha was reported to shout out the window, “Calm down, my friends, let’s talk about this!”

  Before a police marksman shot him dead.

  As William marched back into prison, inmates cheered and banged the walls to greet him. The spree of robberies had made him infamous. And while he was outside, the commando had recruited members throughout the prison system. Now, he was no lonely villain but a leader of a growing gang. And as he had paid money from the outside, he would be cared for while he was banged up.

  Still William was determined to win his freedom. In 1983, he and other Red Commando prisoners made another escape attempt through a tunnel. They managed to get outside, only to be recaptured by angry military police. William was forced to lie down and a guard smashed him over the head with a crushing blow.

  Stretched out on the ground, I didn’t see the blow coming and didn’t have time to make a defensive gesture. Later I woke coughing up blood, my head filled with infernal pain. At the hospital where they sent me they explained that I had nearly died and it was a miracle I was not paralyzed.3

  He still suffers from the injury today.

  Some believe bad and good things arrive in our lives together, like clouds with silver linings. In William’s case, his injury coincided with his love for Simone. He tells the story in romantic language.

  Simone came to the prison as a support worker and helped with his many legal cases. William was impressed by her bravery entering the jail of leering hardened criminals. He made their meetings last as long as he could, as he told her his life story, his fears, and his hopes. He quickly fell head over heels and wanted to declare his love for her but was terrified she would refuse. Eventually, on what was supposed to be their last meeting, she beat him to it.

  Simone spoke calmly. She had been touched by our first meeting in August. Having heard so many lies about me she had expected to be faced with a powerful boss figure and had seen instead a simple, vulnerable person wearing shorts and espadrilles with no desire to impress and apparently without any special power. A gentle person. She had immediately felt sympathy and indeed tenderness for me. Who was I really? What was I feeling? She was absolutely devastated at having to leave. She wanted to tell me that she was in love with me.

  It was written in the stars.4

  Brazilian politics were also going through a loved-up period as the generals put a civilian in power in 1985, ending the military dictatorship. In the democratic spirit, the guerrillas rose inside legal political parties and broke off remaining links with the Red Commando.

  But the commando continued to grow, spreading to almost every prison in Rio State and many favelas. Jailing its leaders such as William did not stop them giving orders to those outside. Latin American nations struggle with the problem of gangs ruling the streets from behind bars. Penitentiaries provide venues where leaders can meet and communicate. They are places where up-and-coming thugs get a chance to know the top guys and win their favor. Those on the street obey the orders of those in prison and pay their dues, because they know they could end up jailed themselves.

  Brazil has tried moving leaders to far-off jails and isolating them. But it is hard to cut off gang leaders completely as the law allows them to talk with counselors or family members who convey messages. Furthermore, Brazil’s prison directors often bow to the pressure of the Red Commando to give them certain liberties, allowing leaders to share cells. If the commando doesn’t get its demands, it can orchestrate attacks on police and start prison riots.

  Despite the problems it causes, the commando also creates a certain order in the jail, often reducing violence and providing an alternate authority that guards can deal with.

  “Negotiating with the commando is the only way that the guards can operate,” says Simone after her three decades of working in jails. “Like in any society above a certain size, you need organizations. The prison authorities give the inmates nothing. They leave it up to the commando to create order.”

  This creates another paradox of Latin America’s crime wars. Prisons are meant to stop gangsters from committing crimes. But they became their headquarters.

  CHAPTER 11

  The growing legion of Red Commando gunmen meant more salaries to pay. But as the eighties progressed, banks in Brazil, and across the world, installed sophisticated security such as cameras and time-locked vault doors. Moves to credit cards and electronic money also meant fewer bills to pilfer. The golden days of bank robbing—especially by urban guerrillas in flared trousers—were over.

  However, the Red Commando found a new business, one that could finance its expansion for the next generation. They made their fortune with the drug known as blow, snow, yayo, Charlie, Chang, perico, parrot, c-dust, or, more commonly, cocaine.

  In the Antares favela, I see the Red Commando’s lucrative product on display, the white powder packaged into transparent baggies. The funk partiers sprinkle the dust into lines and snort it up their noses to get the coke high: a buzz of energy, the feeling of elation, the urge to dance hard to the beat, the ability to have prolonged sex. In New York, a gram can cost a hundred dollars, and in Europe, it sells for over 150 euros. But here, close to the Andes where it comes from, it’s cheap and cheerful at about fifteen bucks a gram.

  Some Antares residents choose the even cheaper form of crack rocks at two dollars a hit. Crack is made by cooking up cocaine with baking powder and is smoked in a glass pipe, or more often in a beer can with holes pricked through. It gives a more intense version of the coke high, an extra rush of elation, and is way more addictive.

  The history of the “wonder drug” has been well documented. German scientists first isolated cocaine from the coca leaves of the Andes in the 1850s. It boomed in the United States in the 1970s when it powered the disco explosion from Miami to New York. Colombians produced most of this cocaine, flying it straight over the Caribbean to Florida. These were the days when Time named it the all-American drug and Woody Allen sneezed into a tin of cocaine to cinematic guffaws in Annie Hall. While audiences were in stitches, the coke dollars created the first drug trafficking billionaires in Pablo Escobar and his cronies in the Medellín Cartel.

&nbs
p; From the 1980s, cocaine became increasingly popular over the pond in Europe. Ravers in London, Madrid, and Rome all wanted some of the action they saw in Miami Vice. A major route for this Atlantic-bound cocaine is naturally Brazil; Colombia and the other coca-producing countries of Peru and Bolivia all share land borders with the South American giant. Once in Brazil, traffickers take cocaine on the many commercial ships to Portugal and Spain, or to Africa and over the Mediterranean into Europe.

  Colombian traffickers worked with Brazilian crooks to move the powder through their country. As the Red Commando controls Rio, one of Brazil’s biggest ports, it was quick to get a piece. The Red Commando hoods began as paid couriers, moving produce and guarding it in stash houses. But soon they became traffickers themselves.

  As well as moving drugs to Europe, the Red Commando capitalized on the local market. Simone has one story about how the cocaine heading east leaked onto Rio’s streets.

  “In the early eighties, you started realizing that drugs were moving through the city, going on these boats to Africa and Europe. Then one summer, a Chilean ship was searched by police and the traffickers threw these crates of tomato cans that had drugs in them into the sea.

  “The cans washed up on the beach. They were these big red tins and people opened them up and found all these drugs inside. Suddenly everyone was taking the chemicals. It was known as the summer of the cans.”

  It’s a cute story. But U.S. and Brazilian drug agents describe another way that might have been more important to cocaine spilling onto Brazil’s streets. Colombian traffickers often paid their couriers with cocaine instead of money. This made both parties happy. For the trafficker it is cheaper, while the courier makes extra cash selling the drugs locally.

  For example, a kilo brick of cocaine costs about two thousand dollars in Colombia. But on the streets of Brazil, it can be broken down into grams and sold for fifteen thousand. It is easier for a trafficker to pay someone with a brick and allow them to make the markup themselves. When the trafficker gets his drugs to the United States, a brick can be broken down to fetch more than a hundred thousand dollars, and in Europe it can make double that.

  Such is the wonder of cocaine economics. Its prices shoot up at such a ridiculous rate along the chain that everybody wants a part of it, especially the ones with the biggest guns. The result is that trafficking routes for cocaine, such as those through Brazil and Mexico, leave behind millions of users in their wake.

  The Brazilian cocaine market boomed. The party powder found a river of customers in the nation of two hundred million, blending in with Brazil’s festive lifestyle just as it did with the American disco scene. Brazilians shook to samba and funk on the coke high.

  Brazil is now likely the second biggest consumer of cocaine in the world after the United States. The United Nations estimated 1.4 percent of Brazilians had used the powder or rock in the last year, close to the 1.5 percent of Americans believed to use it.1 In its aspiration to reach the first world, Brazil is becoming a true consumer nation—in both car and cocaine sales.

  The U.N. estimated that there were 2.8 million Brazilian cocaine users, smoking or snorting their way through ninety-two tons of blow every year. That translates to more than a billion dollars annually going to gangs such as the Red Commando. And Brazilians also spend on marijuana and other drugs.

  It was a fate of history that Brazil’s cocaine market exploded when the Red Commando was in place in the favelas. The money financed the commando’s sellers and soldiers to spread further across Rio State, and then to cells, allies, and rivals across Brazil. The commando opened bocas like the ones in Antares in hundreds of favelas, creating thousands of employees.

  In line with its revolutionary rhetoric, the Red Commando justified selling coke by saying it was a vice of wealthy Brazilians that gave the poor an income.

  “The middle class went to the favela and they wanted drugs. So the Red Commando provided it for them,” William says.

  However, the vice spread to favela dwellers, with dealers sniffing as they sold it. Many slum residents also developed a taste for rocks, sparking a crack wave in Brazil today that is reminiscent of the U.S. crack epidemic in the eighties. A government survey found that Brazil has now usurped the United States as the biggest crack-using country in the world, with at least 370,000 people burning their lives away through pipes.2

  The Antares favela has a spot under the train bridge where hard-core addicts hang out. They call it a crackolândia, or a “crackland.” I go there to find two dozen smokers lying about in filthy clothes, drawing on pipes, with numb expressions on their faces. The Red Commando might put on lively parties, but this is another side of what it brings here.

  Cocaine sales in Brazil, Europe, and the United States all added to the fortunes of Pablo Escobar and his fellow Colombian crime kings. Forbes said Escobar was personally worth three billion dollars, with some other media outlets putting his wealth in eleven digits.3 I am suspicious of pinning exact numbers on their treasure as no one really knows the precise wealth of these traffickers, probably not even the kingpins themselves. But judging from the amount of cocaine users and money paid for it, it is fair to estimate he was a multibillionaire.

  Escobar’s story is immortalized in a mammoth Spanish-language TV series with 113 episodes that is a hit across Latin America. The drug lord built an entire neighborhood in Medellín, financed an army of killers to shoot police, and brought down an airliner, killing 110 people, including two Americans.4 His murder spree made him enemies everywhere, leading to a manhunt involving the Colombian police and army, rival traffickers, the DEA, Pentagon, and CIA. When Colombian special forces finally killed Escobar in 1993, they posed smiling with the body of the world’s greatest outlaw.

  However, Escobar’s death hardly dented the cocaine trade, with a host of other players taking over. Rival traffickers such as the Cali Cartel and later Norte del Valle Cartel got a piece as did right-wing paramilitaries. But one of the biggest winners was the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the leftist guerrilla army.

  The FARC formed back in 1964, uniting armed peasants into an insurgent force that vaguely followed the Cuban model. The guerrillas were a minor threat until the eighties when in their seventh conference they approved the motion to traffic in cocaine to fund their revolution.5 It was an effective fit. A guerrilla army provides a strong organization to traffic drugs, and cocaine money buys guns, uniforms, and food for more guerrillas. They grew, especially following Escobar’s downfall, taking over important coca producing regions.

  After Escobar, Mexican cartels also took a bigger share of the cocaine trade to the United States and Brazilian traffickers of the trade to Europe. Among them were smugglers in the Red Commando.

  Escobar left his shadow over criminals across the continent. Some see the heights he rose to, while others note his superstar profile led to his death. However, when I ask William about the Colombian drug lord, his face crunches up.

  “Pablo Escobar was a traitor. He ordered hits on kids. He used police as security,” William says.

  I wonder if Escobar ever double-crossed the Red Commando. But Simone chips in with another explanation for William’s ire.

  “They are jealous in Brazil, because Pablo Escobar reached a level that none of them got to.” She smiles. “You talk about traffickers here. But he had billions and billions of dollars.”

  William cuts in again. “He was a mercenary. He was right wing. He was a traitor.” I ask William what he thinks of the FARC guerrillas, and his tone switches 180 degrees.

  “They had some good ideas,” William says. “They sold cocaine to the United States.”

  It is interesting to hear William’s sympathy for the FARC. In many ways, the Red Commando and the FARC traveled opposite journeys. The Red Commando was a gang of criminals who became politicized; the FARC was a political force that got into drug trafficking. But I see the similarity. They both claim to represent the poor, fight police, and sell coc
aine.

  William’s sympathy for the FARC also reflects the Red Commando’s business interests; the two groups became increasingly close in moving cocaine and guns. The FARC controlled large coca-producing areas and built their own labs to turn the green leaves into cocaine bricks. However, the guerrillas didn’t themselves smuggle the cocaine into Europe or the United States, instead finding traffickers they could sell to or trade with.

  The Red Commando was a perfect partner, sharing the idea of being a poor man’s army. Furthermore, the commando built a web to traffic guns, which it could trade with the FARC for the white powder. The Reds bought many of their weapons in small South American nations such as Paraguay, Bolivia, and Surinam where corrupt soldiers stole them from national armies. That is why the gunmen I see dancing in the favelas are armed with military-grade rifles and grenade launchers.

  The alliance pumped cocaine profits back into the FARC, swelling the ranks of the guerrillas. By the turn of the millennium, the white windfall allowed the FARC to command seventeen thousand troops, blow up Colombian soldiers, and carry out mass kidnappings—which made them even more money.

  This fusion of insurgent attacks and cocaine trafficking made American agents ring the alarm bells of “narco terrorism.” The phrase was probably coined in neighboring Peru in the early eighties when President Fernando Belaúnde Terry warned of the Shining Path guerrillas working with coca growers.6 But U.S. agents really took it up to refer to the FARC, which became a focus of worry amid the War on Terror. The term brings together the DEA, responsible for the narco part of the phrase, with the CIA, responsible for the terrorist part. The agencies combined forces with their web of narc informants and spy planes to go after the Colombian guerrillas. And this drew them into chasing the Red Commando.