The United States government said Brazil has "failed to confront" the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho, two Brazilian criminal factions that, in Washington's assessment, have turned the country into a hub for global cocaine flows. The criticism appears in an annual presidential determination signed by Donald Trump, sent to the US Congress on Tuesday (15) and released on Wednesday (16), in which the White House identifies the world's major illicit drug producers and trafficking routes and grades each government's counter-narcotics effort.
In practice, Brazil stayed off both formal categories in the document. The list of major producers or transit routes covers 23 countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, China and Afghanistan. The harsher group, of governments that "demonstrated substantial failures" to meet international counter-narcotics commitments, under section 706(2)(A) of the FRAA (Foreign Relations Authorization Act), was limited to Afghanistan, Bolivia, Burma and Colombia, SBT News reported. The document itself cautions, as Folha de S.Paulo noted, that appearing on the list is not automatically a negative verdict, since geographic and commercial factors weigh on the classification.
For President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government, the immediate effect is political. The rebuke lands a little over two weeks before the first round of Brazil's presidential election, and Globo's CBN radio noted that the release came amid signs of US alignment with the positions of opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro against the president. The pressure is not new either: in May, the United States designated the PCC and the Comando Vermelho as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) and, since June 5, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).
What the document says
In the paragraph reserved for Brazil, Trump contrasts the country with its neighbors and demands urgency. The full passage, as released:
"While many governments in the Western Hemisphere are taking bold measures to reduce the flow of drugs and eradicate cartels, the Government of Brazil has failed to confront the designated foreign terrorist organizations Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho, which have transformed Brazil into a hub for global cocaine flows."
"These Brazilian terrorist organizations are a growing threat to peace and security worldwide, and the government of Brazil must urgently take aggressive measures to confront and defeat them before they spread and grow."
Rewards and punishments in the hemisphere
The determination also maps Washington's friends in the region. Venezuela was dropped from the category of countries that "demonstrably failed" on drug control after the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January; Trump credited steps taken by the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez, according to CBN. The American president applauded Argentina, Ecuador and El Salvador as "three of the greatest allies" of the United States in the hemisphere in the fight against narco-terrorism, and kept up harsh criticism of Nicaragua, where the Ortega-Murillo regime, branded a socialist dictatorship, is described as having failed to act against trafficking, with regime agents complicit in the drug trade. Elsewhere in the document, Trump says seizures of fentanyl and other drugs smuggled into the United States have fallen by more than half under his administration.
Formally, nothing changes overnight for Brazil, which escaped both lists in the annual report. The paragraph reserved for Lula's government shows, however, that organized crime has become a fixed item in Washington's public pressure on Brasilia, with an explicit demand for "aggressive measures" in the middle of the election campaign.