The Brazilian PCC: How a Prison Gang Became a Global Superpower – HT
On August 31st, 1993, eight men inside a maximum security prison annex in Talbetate, 130 km from S. Paulo, decided to build something. They had no money, no territory, no weapons, and no freedom. What they had was a name, a statute written on a single sheet of paper, and a grievance. 32 years later, the organization those eight men founded controls the largest cocaine export pipeline on Earth, operates in at least 15 countries, moves an estimated 10 to 12 billion rays a year, and has infiltrated S. Apollo’s legal economy so
deeply that when Brazilian federal police raided their financial network in August 2025, 42 of the warrants landed on a single street. Aanita Faria Lima, the Wall Street of Latin America. And here’s the part that should stop you. The man who runs all of it has been behind bars continuously since 1999. 27 years, a quarter century in cells where he is at this moment alone 22 hours a day in a federal prison in Brasilia under a regime designed specifically to make communication impossible. He has never seen the empire
he built with his own eyes. He has never walked into the port of Santos. He has never set foot in Paraguay. He has never met the Italian mafia families who are his wholesale partners in Antworp. And yet every major decision the organization makes still runs through him. This is a video about the pimero commando de capital the PCC.
But more than that, it’s a video about a specific structural question that I think matters more than any of the names, the seizures, or the body counts. How does a criminal organization become more powerful because its leaders are locked up instead of less? How does decapitation not only failed to destroy it, but accelerate its expansion? Because the answer to that question is the reason this gang became a superpower when every other prison-born faction in the world either collapsed or stayed small. And it’s the reason no one, not
the Brazilian Federal Police, not the DEA, not Europole, not the Italian anti-mafia Directorate, has figured out how to stop it. Most coverage of the PCC describes it the way you describe any other drug trafficking organization, a violent prison gang. S. Apollo’s version of the Commando Vermeo, a Latin American cartel with some distinctive quirks.
I want to tell you upfront that framing is wrong and it is the reason every attempt to stop this organization has failed for three decades. The PCC is not a cartel. It doesn’t behave like one. It doesn’t fund itself like one and it doesn’t fracture like one. What it actually is requires us to go back to a specific afternoon in a specific prison in S. Paulo.
Because without that day, none of the rest of this makes sense. October 2nd, 1992, the Casa deen de S. Paulo, better known as Karanderu in the city’s Zona Norte. The prison had an official capacity of 3,250 inmates. That day it held more than 7,200. Pavlon 9, the one they called Favlano, held just over 2,000 men, mostly pre-trial detainees who had never been convicted of anything, supervised by 15 guards.
A fight broke out around 1:30 in the afternoon during a soccer match. The guards shut the corridor gate, which escalated the fight into a riot. The prison director called the military police, Colonel Uberatan Gimares, after consulting the state secretary of public security, ordered more than 300 officers into Pavio 9.
The killing took between 30 and 45 minutes. The official death toll was 111 prisoners, zero police, 515 shots fired. Each victim hit on average 4.04 04 bullets. Some were hit with up to 16. 84 of the 111 dead had never been convicted of a crime. Human rights investigators and survivor testimony put the real number closer to 250 because the military police ordered inmates to move bodies and wash floors before forensic teams arrived.
In the years that followed, no one served a meaningful sentence for Karanderu. Uratan Gimares was convicted of 102 of the 111 deaths in 2001, sentenced to 632 years and allowed to appeal in freedom. He ran for state deputy in 2002 and won with 56,000 votes. His campaign number in his reelection bid was 14,111. The 111 was not an accident.
In 2006, a S. Paulo appeals court voided his conviction 20-2. 3 months later, he was found shot dead in his apartment. The crime remains officially unsolved. He was buried at address number 111. The prison director who was on duty that day, Jose Ismael Pedrosa, was killed in 2005, almost certainly by the organization that created the massacre.
The prison itself was demolished in December 2002. In 2016, a court ruled the whole thing was self-defense, and as of today, no one has served a sentence. That is what the men inside Brazilian prisons saw. not a tragedy, not an aberration, a message. The state would kill them indiscriminately. It would lie about it and it would face no consequences.
The signature cut at the back of the neck, the mark that would start appearing in S. Paulo prisons less than 2 years later, didn’t come from nowhere. A prison doctor named Drowsio Varela saw the first one in 1994 and a guard said to him, quote, “That’s the PCC. Those guys are going to be talked about.” He was right.
11 months after Karandiru on August 31st, 1993, eight men in a separate maximum security facility called the Taoate Annex, the one everyone called Pyano, big Pya, founded the organization. The Pyano was S. Paulo’s de facto supermax. 23 hours a day in windowless cells, lights always on, concrete. I want you to hold on to that description because it’s going to matter later in ways that aren’t obvious yet.
During an inter prison soccer match in the Piranhon Courtyard, one of the founders, Jose Marcio Felicio, known as Gelon, killed a rival inmate named Bayano Seo by breaking his neck with his bare hands. The way the journalist Clauddio Tonioli later described it, Geleon wrapped both of his enormous hands around the man’s head and like someone smoothing a ball killed him with a single movement.
A deputy director and a privileged inmate were also killed and decapitated and one head was placed on a stake in the courtyard. From that day on, the eight men assumed internal control of the annex. They gave themselves a name, Pimero Commando Dapital, the first command of the capital. The capital being S. Paulo. They also gave themselves a numeric code 1533 because P and C are the 15th and third letters of the Brazilian alphabet.
And they wrote a statute, 16 articles. The first one said, “Loyalty, respect and solidarity above all to the party.” The seventh article said, “And this is the one that matters more than any other that any member living in freedom who was well structured financially but forgot to contribute to the brothers in prison would be condemned to death without pardon.
” That article, the seventh one, would eventually become the blueprint for a funding model no cartel on Earth had ever attempted. In February 2001, the PCC announced itself to Brazil. Simultaneous rebellions erupted across 29 penal facilities in the state of S. Apollo, 25 prisons, two public jails, two police stations, 19 cities, about 25,000 prisoners, and roughly 10,000 hostages. 16 prisoners were killed.
The coordination was achieved through cell phones smuggled in by lawyers, family members, and corrupt guards with the orders originating from two PCC leaders who were physically located at the time in a prison in Porto Allegre almost,00 kilometers away. Within days of the rebellion, the organization added about 1,200 new members. The S.
Apollo State government, which had officially denied the PCC’s existence for eight straight years, could no longer pretend. In October 2002, a woman named Anna Maria Olivato was shot twice in the neck in her garage in Guarulos. She was 45 years old. She was a lawyer. She was about to drive to a prison visit with two PCC leaders named Jalle Yango and Cassinia.
She was also the wife of a mid-level PCC figure named Marcos Williams Herbas Kamacho, known to everyone as Marcola. The hit had been ordered by Ceia’s wife, almost certainly with Jelleon’s knowledge. And this is where I want to pause for a second because this is the moment the PCC stopped being a prison gang and became something else.
And I don’t think most coverage of this organization sits with what that actually required. Marcola could have responded the way any other criminal in that position would have direct retaliation. Send people to kill Helang and Ceia. Instead, within weeks, he leaked evidence to the rest of the organization that Jelle Yang had been convicted of rape, which under the PCC statute is a capital offense.
He used the statute itself as the weapon. Jalleó and Ceia were expelled. They fled into protective custody. They tried to found a rival faction called the third command of the capital. Cea was killed in prison in 2006. Jalleon became an informant and died of COVID 19 in May 2021. Marcola, the petty bank robber, the self-taught reader, the orphan who had been stealing since he was 9 years old, walked into the leadership of the PCC by using the organization’s own rules against the men who had founded it.
That’s not brute force. That’s institutional sophistication, and it tells you what kind of person you’re actually dealing with. Marcola was born on April 20th, 1968 in S. Paulo. His father was Bolivian. His mother was Brazilian and both were gone before he was 10. He got his nickname from combining his first name with cola, industrial glue, which gives you an idea of what his childhood looked like.
He has been in continuous custody since July 1999. His total sentences now exceed 330 years, though Brazilian law cap’s actual time served at 40. He has claimed in multiple documents and interviews to have read more than 3,000 books in prison. He cites Dante, Nietze, Makavelli, Sunsu, Marx, Orwell. He rereads Clausowitz.
I have to address something here because if you’ve ever read the famous quote attributed to Marcola, the one where he supposedly told an interviewer in 2006 that we are in a crisis of modernity, we are postmodern. We have atomic bombs and you have reality television. That quote is not real. It was a column written by a Brazilian journalist named Arnaldo Jabore, published as a piece of literary imagination, and it has poisoned 20 years of coverage.
The real Marcola is not a poet. He is a bureaucrat. The actual Marcola speaks in the language of procedures, votes, collegial decisions, and institutional survival. He is almost boring to read, which is exactly what makes him dangerous. and which is exactly what the people who romanticize him as a criminal philosopher keep getting wrong. On May 11th, 2006, the S.
Paulo Prison Administration announced it was transferring 765 PCC leaders, Marcola included, to a new maximum security unit at President Ventaslau. The official reason was intelligence suggesting a Mother’s Day rebellion. The same day at police headquarters, Marcola turned to the officers escorting him and said, “It’s not going to be cheap.
” The following week became by a significant margin the most devastating single episode of organized criminal violence in the history of modern Brazil. Between May 12th and May 21st, 564 people were killed. 59 of them were public security agents. police officers, prison guards, military personnel. The remaining 505 were civilians, and of those, the academic literature estimates that roughly 140 were killed in what amounted to an extrajudicial counterwave by masked groups, widely understood to include offduty police death squads.
About 90 buses were burned. 74 of the state’s 105 prisons rebelled simultaneously. 17 banks were attacked. 56 police officers homes were attacked. More than 5 million people were stranded across the metropolitan area. The city of S. Paulo for 3 days stopped. The orders came through smuggled cell phones from prison cells using a single word salve which in PCC terminology means a general directive.
One word transmitted through smuggled phones paralyzed a city of 20 million people. That’s what the state actually did not understand until it was too late. What came next in the days after the PCC attacks ended was what researchers now call the crimes of May. The wave of summary killings carried out in the periphery targeting young black men who in most cases had no verifiable connection to the PCC at all.
The mind’s deayo, the movement of mothers who lost sons in that week are still fighting in Brazilian courts for recognition of what happened to their children. The sociologist Camila Nunes Diaz described the state response in plain language. The reaction was to kill indiscriminately people from the periphery to send the message never do this again.
So I want to ask you something before I move on. What do you think was the real outcome of May 2006? The attacks or the reprisals? Tell me in the comments because the answer matters for what happens next. Here’s what happened next. The Brazilian state responded to the attacks by doing exactly what the state had done to create the PCC in the first place.
It incarcerated people harder, transferred leaders to different prisons across the country, expanded the federal maximum security system, and treated the whole thing as a law enforcement problem. Every single one of those transfers spread the PCC to a new Brazilian state. By 2018, the organization had presence in all 27 Brazilian states, including ones where it had never operated before.
The mass incarceration response didn’t weaken the organization, it distributed it. Now, I want to walk you through what the PCC actually became because this is the part that gets misunderstood constantly. The organization is structured into what it calls Cintonias, literally tunings or harmonics.
As of 2024, Brazilian organized crime investigators have mapped at least 12 active Centonia. At the top sits the Centonia Final Gerald, which functions as a board of directors. Currently about eight men, Marcola among them making final decisions on strategy. Below that sits the Centonia Restita created in 2014 which handles the most sensitive operations including intelligence and assassinations.
Then you have operational Centonas. The Centonia Geral dos Estados coordinates activities across Brazilian states subdivided by phone area codes. The Centonia do exterior handles international operations and this is the one that opened Paraguay starting around 2010. The Centonia Gerro do progresso manages the drug trade, the main revenue line.
The Centonia financer handles consolidated money flows. The Centonia do gravatas literally the neckties is the legal department coordinating the lawyers who serve as what the organization calls pomos coro carrier pigeons shuttling messages between imprisoned leaders and the outside there’s a centonia dose ibus that operates a fleet of about 50 PCC owned buses fing members to prison visits across the interior here.
There’s even a Centonia DA Internet A RAD associated recently that monitors members social media activity. And then overseeing everything, there’s a unit called Rio X, literally X-ray, which is the organization’s internal audit function. The membership structure is explicit. To become a member, a candidate has to be baptized batazado in a ceremony that involves an 11 question interrogation, a sponsor who is responsible for the candidates’s behavior, and a loyalty oath.
As of 2024, the Brazilian public ministry estimates there are about 40,000 baptized brothers or most and roughly 60,000 additional companos associates who operate under the organization’s authority without full membership rights. For most of its history, every baptized member paid monthly dues.
The dues were called the sabola the onion because paying them made you cry. Street members at peak were paying as much as 950 re a month. The salo monthly dues alone totaled about 1.9 million re. On top of that the organization ran a raffle every two months. 45,000 tickets at 40 riets each which added another 1.8 million reass system operated continuously for about 27 years.
It funded lawyers, prison visits, family support and operational expenses for members in custody. And then around 2021, the PCC quietly stopped collecting dues from most members. The reason is something I’m going to come back to in a few minutes because it tells you exactly what kind of organization this has become. But before I get there, actually this is the part I keep coming back to and it matters more than I initially realized.
The dos matter, the organagram matters, the 12 centonas matter, but the thing that actually makes all of this work is something more fundamental. And I want to sit with it for a second. Two American political scientists, Benjamin Leing and Graham Denier Willis, did something in 2019 that almost no one else had bothered to do.
They actually read the internal documents that Brazilian police had seized from PCC members over the course of a decade. What they found was that the organization had three features that no other major criminal group on Earth exhibited simultaneously. First, its drug trafficking operated on a decentralized consignment basis, not a hierarchical franchise model.
Any baptized member could run his own drug operation as long as he kicked up to the organization and followed the rules. Second, the organization maintained meticulous internal bureaucratic records, what Les called criminal criminal records, tracking every member’s history of obedience and infraction. Third, and this is the part that shocked them, the punishments were overwhelmingly nonviolent.
Three strikes, fines, suspension of benefits, expulsion. Death sentences existed, but were the last resort, not the first. What that combination produces, if you think about it for a second, is a criminal organization that behaves like a functioning state. It has laws. It enforces them procedurally. It collects revenue.
It provides services to members. And it resolves disputes through institutional channels instead of through personal vendettas. That is why when S. Paulo’s homicide rate fell by more than 70% between 2000 and 2017, it wasn’t because the state suddenly got better at policing. It was because the PCC had monopolized violence so effectively that disputes that would previously have ended in shootings now ended in what the organization calls debates.
Internal tribunals conducted over encrypted video calls with a prosecutor, a defender, and a jury of Baptized Brothers. And the state has accommodated this arrangement because the alternative is worse. That’s the thing everyone keeps missing about the PCC. It is not a gang. It is a parallel government with a criminal revenue base.
And that structural fact is the reason it has survived for 32 years of continuous leadership incarceration when every other major criminal organization in the world fragments the moment its leader goes down. Marcola going to prison didn’t weaken the PCC. It institutionalized it. The man became a head of state in exile, except the exile was solitary confinement, and the state he governed was a criminal order that now spans continents.
If you’re still with me on this one, a subscribe would mean a lot. This is the video I’ve wanted to make for a long time. Let me show you what this structure actually enables because the last 15 years of PCC history only makes sense once you understand the bureaucratic foundation. In the early 2000s, Brazil had a geographic problem and a geographic opportunity.
The country borders 10 other nations, three of which Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, are the world’s top cocaine producers. Brazil has the largest port in the southern hemisphere and Brazil has Portuguese language historical ties to Angola, Mosambique, Cabo Verde, Gina Bisau and Portugal itself. No single cartel had ever integrated that geographic endowment.
The PCC did. The first major move was Paraguay. For decades, the Brazilian Paraguayan border had been controlled by a man named Jorge Rafat Tumani. They called him the king of the border. Rafaat operated out of Pedro Juan Cababayero, the Paraguayan town directly opposite the Brazilian city of Pontapuron, separated only by a two-lane street.
On June 15th, 2016, an armored SUV with a 50 caliber anti-aircraft machine gun mounted on it intercepted RafaT’s vehicle in downtown Pedro Juan Cabayro. He was hit more than 16 times. About 200 shell casings were recovered at the scene. The operation cost more than a million dollars to execute. Within weeks, roughly 40 of Rafaat’s associates had been killed.
The PCC had just taken control of the Brazilian cocaine corridor from Paraguay, and it had used a level of firepower that paramilitary forces would struggle to match. The port of Santos is where the PCC’s cocaine leaves Latin America. The port handles about 150 million tons of cargo a year, moves around 5 million shipping containers, and connects to more than 600 ports in 125 countries.
Before I give you the number, let me ask, what percentage of all Brazilian cocaine seizures do you think come out of this single port? I’ll wait. The answer across the years 2019 through 2023 is 48%. Nearly half of all the cocaine intercepted in Brazil was on its way out through Santos. And according to the Brazilian federal prosecutor Lincoln Gakia, who has spent 20 years investigating the PCC, the organization is currently exporting between four and 5 tons of cocaine per month through Santos alone, which works out to
something like 48 to 60 tons per year, generating roughly 1 billion US annually from that single route. The destination more often than not is Antworp. Belgium intercepted 116 tons of cocaine in 2023, a single port in a country the size of Maryland. Rotterdam took in about 60 tons the same year.
The German port of Hamburg took 25 tons across a 6-month window. The total volume of cocaine seized at European Union ports in 2023 was 419 tons, the seventh consecutive annual record. And the European retail cocaine market is now estimated at about 10.5 billion euros per year. The PCC does not distribute this cocaine at the street level in Europe.
That’s the part that gets overlooked. The PCC deliberately decided not to compete for retail in Europe, which is the decision that destroyed the Mexican cartels when they tried it. Instead, the PCC positions itself as the wholesale partner to the Italian Nangata, which controls about 80% of European cocaine entry to the Balkan clans in Montenegro and Serbia, to the Moroccan groups in the Netherlands, and to West African networks in Nigeria, Guinea, Biso, and Mosambique.
The PCC sells in tons, not in grams. And because it sells in tons, it never has to fight with the retailers for territory. And remember the description of the pirano from earlier, the windowless cells, the 23 hours a day in concrete, the lights that never turn off. Marcola is in Brazilia now at the federal maximum security prison there, and the conditions are exactly the same.
22 hours a day in isolation, lights on, federal monitoring of every legal visit. That’s where the decisions on Antworp, Santos, the Andrangata Partnership, and the Paraguay Corridor get made. A man in a concrete cell running a cocaine pipeline that moves more product than most countries GDPs. That’s not a metaphor.
That’s what the organizational structure actually enables. On May 10th, 2022, a 45-year-old Paraguayan prosecutor named Marcelo Py was on his honeymoon at Baru Island off the Colombian coast. PY had led Paraguay’s most aggressive investigations into PCC linked money laundering, including the A Ultransza case that had exposed the organization’s operations across four countries.
his new wife, Claudia Aguilera, had announced her pregnancy to him that morning. Hours later, two men arrived on a jet ski. The lead shooter, a Venezuelan gun for hire named Wendre Still Scott Carillo, walked up to Pachy and shot him first in the mouth, a marksman’s signature, and a message. The Colombian Attorney General confirmed that the murder was ordered by a transnational criminal network with PCC involvement and the contract was worth more than $500,000 US.
In January 2026, the man Colombian police identified as the ring leader, Francisco Luis Korea Galliano, was murdered inside a Bogota prison while awaiting trial. The case is still officially unresolved. That’s what the PCC is now capable of. A Brazilian prison gang founded by eight men in Tabate in 1993 ordered the assassination of a senior Paraguayan prosecutor on a Colombian beach using a Venezuelan contractor and a jet ski.
And when the ring leader was arrested, the PCC arranged for him to be killed inside Colombia’s most secure prison before he could testify. The operational reach is what you would expect from a state intelligence service. The coordination came out of a cell in Brazil. And then on August 28th, 2025, Brazilian federal police launched an operation called Carbono Okulto, hidden carbon, 1,400 agents, more than 200 arrest warrants, targets in eight states.
And of those warrants, 42 were served on Avanita Faria Lima, the Wall Street of S. Paulo. What the investigation had found was that the PCC had moved approximately 52 billion RIA over 4 years through a network of about 1,000 fuel stations. A single fintech called BK Bank had been used to move 46 billion rays in suspicious transactions.
More than 30 billion REI in patrimony had been identified across more than 40 closed investment funds. An asset manager called Ryag Investimentos which had 299 billion RAZ under management saw its stock collapse on the day of the operation and was formally liquidated by Brazil’s central bank on January 2026. A S.
Paulo judge described what had been uncovered as quote a parallel state now with a paristatal economic arm. I want you to understand what that means because I don’t know how to read that other than as a state that is currently losing an argument it doesn’t even know it’s having. The PCC is not laundering money into the legal economy anymore. The PCC has moved its operations inside the legal economy.
The fuel stations are real fuel stations. Fintech was a licensed fintech. The asset manager was administering public investment funds. Operas Carbono Okulto didn’t uncover a criminal organization hiding in Brazilian finance. It uncovered a criminal organization that had already become part of it. That is the single clearest signal of what the PCC has become.
It is not fighting the state anymore. It is competing with it. Now, I covered Cypress a while back. the way the Golden Passport program let criminal money buy European citizenship at scale with more than 6,700 passports issued and the majority of them later found to be illegal. What’s happening in S. Paulo is almost the opposite pattern.
Cypress was a state selling the infrastructure of legitimacy to criminals for cash. Brazil’s PCC is a criminal organization buying the infrastructure of legitimacy piece by piece without anyone needing to issue a document. Both end at the same place. Criminal wealth inside legal institutions. They just got there from opposite directions.
And honestly, I think the Brazilian version is harder to reverse because there’s no registry to audit. There’s just a fuel station and then another one and then an investment fund and then a private equity vehicle. And at some point, there’s nothing left to confiscate because the entire supply chain has been legalized.
Which brings us to what’s happened to the PCC’s leadership in the last two years because on the surface it looks like the organization is in crisis. In February 2024, a senior PCC figure named Roberto Soraniano, known as Terza, allied with two other leaders and issued an internal salve calling for Marcola’s death on the accusation that Marcola had cooperated with authorities.
The Centonia final responded with a counter salv expelling all three and decreeing their deaths. It was the most serious internal challenge in the organization’s history. The Brazilian prosecutor, Lincoln Gakia, called it the worst crisis the faction had faced in 30 years. And in May 2025, Marcos Roberto de Almeida, known as Tuta, the man Marcola had handpicked to eventually succeed him, was arrested at a government by D office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, after fingerprint biometrics flagged him, renewing a fake Bolivian ID
card under the name Monon Gonalves Dilva. He had been hiding in Bolivia for at least 5 years. He was expelled to Brazil within 48 hours. On the surface, that’s a collapse. A civil war inside the leadership. The heir was apparently arrested and extradited. The organization should be fragmenting. It isn’t.
Teresa, who issued the South against Marcola, said something in court on June 2025 that I keep thinking about. He told the judge, “I am not an enemy of the PCC. I am an enemy of Marcola.” And that sentences the whole argument. Even the rebels couldn’t turn against the institution. He could attack the man, but he couldn’t attack the structure.
Tuda’s arrest in Bolivia disrupted nothing. The Centonia final elevated a new international coordinator within weeks. A cartel loses its number two and the organization splinters. The PCC loses its number two and the next man in the line takes the seat. That’s not resilience. That’s institutionalization. That’s what happens when an organization has outgrown its founders.
Marcola is still in Brazilia. The federal court extended his custody for another 360 days in late 2025, citing intelligence of an 80 mercenary rescue plot with helicopters, tanks, and a budget of roughly 100 million rays. The plot was real. The Centonia still meet now through encrypted video conferences that require multiple layers of authentication.
The Sabola, the monthly dues, was discontinued around 2021 because the drug trade now generates so much that internal dues are not worth the accounting. The Brazilian public ministry estimates the PCC now earns between 10 and 12 billion re a year. 20 years ago, that number was 10 million. That’s not a 100fold increase. That’s a thousandfold increase over a period during which the organization’s founder and his entire inner circle have been continuously imprisoned.
The fleet of PCC owned buses is still fing mothers to prison visits across the interior of S. Paulo. The statute that Misael wrote on a single sheet of paper in 1993, 16 articles long, has been amended twice, expanded to 18 articles, and is still read aloud at every baptism of every new member.
The organization has between 40 and 100,000 members, depending on how you count them. It operates in at least 15 countries, and some sources say more. It has absorbed its rivals, survived its internal civil wars, outlasted six Brazilian presidents and four major policy shifts, and integrated itself into the legal economy of Latin America’s largest country.
There is a container leaving the port of Santos tonight, probably right now as you’re watching this, roughly 9,000 containers leave Santos every day. And current Brazilian inspection rates mean that on average one container in 200 will be searched. That’s half of 1%. The rest will move unopened through a shipping network that connects to Antworp, to Rotterdam, to Hamburg, to Algosirus, to Lisbon, to Durban, to Lagos. Some of them will carry coffee.
Some of them will carry soybeans. Some of them will carry the product of a criminal organization founded by eight men in a prison annex 32 years ago, whose leader has not seen the outside world in 27 years, and whose financial arm now sits on the same avenue as Brazil’s largest investment banks. The machine is running.
It has always been running. It was designed to