An unprecedented study by the Instituto Sou da Paz, a São Paulo-based public security think tank, has identified rifle ammunition purchased by the Brazilian Army in seizures linked to the Comando Vermelho, the country's largest drug trafficking faction. The findings were reported on Sunday (11) by the TV program Fantástico and the news portal G1. The survey analyzed records of 31,699 intact cartridges seized in different Brazilian states, cross-referencing forensic reports and court cases.
What the data consistently shows: four out of every ten rounds seized from faction members in the analyzed cases were Brazilian-made, and some cartridges had been manufactured shortly before the seizures. The study also found that part of the ammunition used by criminals against police during a massive 2025 operation in Rio de Janeiro belonged to the security forces themselves. What remains unknown, and the researchers are explicit about this, is the exact route of the diversion: in many cases, institutions can confirm they purchased and received the material, but cannot say how it was distributed after reaching their depots.
Tracing exists, but stops halfway
About 20 years ago, Brazilian-made ammunition bought by security forces began carrying a traceability code engraved on each cartridge, which allows investigators to identify the origin of rounds found at crime scenes. There is, however, no registry of later transfers or buyers of those lots. According to the study, this gap is what prevents reconstructing the full path of the cartridges.
One of the cases examined was the 2019 interception, in the Federal District, of a shipment of 1,804 cartridges bound for Rio de Janeiro. The cargo included lots from the Army, the military police of the Federal District and Rio, Mato Grosso's state security fund and the Ministry of Justice, and some of those lots had already surfaced in other seizures.
"This tells us that this source of diversion is a big one, that it involves a lot of people, and that the police have not managed to fully dismantle it," Bruno Langeani, a consultant at Instituto Sou da Paz, told Fantástico.
Another case occurred in January 2025 in Fortaleza, where an investigation uncovered a Comando Vermelho plan to break inmates out of a Ceará prison. Penal police officers monitoring the faction were attacked; one agent was killed and another wounded. Police seized 400 rifle cartridges, and photographs showed boxes in original Brazilian ammunition packaging. That information, however, was never included in the police inquiry, which blocked any tracing attempt, according to the institute.
Official responses and what can be done
In a statement, the Army said it recognizes the seriousness of ammunition losses and thefts, constantly reviews its control procedures and opens a Military Police Inquiry whenever there are signs of irregularities. The Federal District's military police said its storage and control protocols have been revised, and the Ministry of Justice said that fighting the diversion of legal weapons and ammunition is one of the priorities of the control policy resumed by the federal government in 2023.
In practical terms, the study points to two measures within the authorities' immediate reach: systematically recording seized lot data in police inquiries, so tracing becomes possible, and making public the list of ammunition buyer codes, a demand Sou da Paz has already made to the Army. "Society has the right to know what is being done with ammunition bought with public money," Langeani said. Without those two steps, the researchers warn, each new seizure will keep showing where the cartridges ended up, but never how they got there.