How the CCP works, the powerful and fearsome Brazilian mafia that manages crime in South America

The first command of the capital It emerged in the early 1990s during a prison rebellion in São Paulo. Three decades later, he remained like the most important criminal organization from South America and is suspected of the murder of Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci in the Colombian Caribbean.

Colombian general Jorge Luis Vargas declared that the powerful faction would have negotiated to attack Pecci in Paraguay, where the group took control of the trafficking after the murder of Jorge Rafaat Toumani, a former drug kingpin on the border with Brazil.

According to Vargas, since the murder could not be carried out in Paraguay, there was an agreement between international criminal organizations so that “it could be carried out anywhere in the world”, under the alleged coordination of the CCPwhich was investigated by the prosecutor.

The CCP in South America

With over 30,000 “baptized” members, the CCP has emerged as a “criminal enterprise” with tentacles practically all over South America, but mostly in Bolivia and Paraguay. the main route of the drug from Colombia or Peru to Brazil, as explained in an interview with Efe Lincoln Gakiya, head of the investigation against the group in the country.

After clashes with rival clans, the CCP was strengthened especially in Paraguaywhere it came to dominate the prisons and from where it controls the region of the triple border with Argentina and Brazil.

“It is an important country because cocaine from Peru and Colombia arrives there and is then transported to Brazil,” added Gakiya, prosecutor of the Special Action Group to Combat Organized Crime of the Public Prosecutor of São Paulo.

Despite its “union” origins, the CCP today it is almost exclusively dedicated to international drug trafficking and he became a “distributor” who was able to exploit the gaps opened by the Mexican and Colombian cartels.

“The CCP has discovered a niche market that has not been exploited by either the Mexicans or the Colombians. The main consumer market for both is the United States. the European route remained in the background and the CCP found out, “he explains.

The “foreign” drug traffickers, Gakiya said, traveled to various Latin American countries to acquire the drug, but did not have the necessary logistics to transport the cocaine to Europe, a vacuum that the CCP has been able to exploit and which made him “the greatest and most influential” South American organization.

Once in Brazilian territory, the drug is sent to Europe mainly through the Brazilian port of Santos, in Sao Paulo, bribing officials.

From gangsters to gangsters

According to the seized documents, the CCP currently exports to Europe an average of 1 ton of cocaine per month, with a value of 35,000 euros per kilo. However, according to the prosecutor’s calculations, they can reach 10 tons per month, so their annual turnover could exceed 500 million dollars.

To ensure their landing, the CCP tied alliances with major European drug traffickerswho receive 40% of the drug exported by the Brazilian organization in exchange for free admission.

“Their way of acting is similar to that of foreign mafias, these criminal organizations also have links with some mafias that operate outside the country, like ItalianCommissioner Fernando Santiago, of the San Pablo Civil Police, explained this to Efe.

Research has shown that the CCP would a close link with the ‘Ndranghetamobster originally from the Italian region of Calabria.

The Brazilian faction has also recently acquired Mafia status by stepping up its money laundering operation, although, according to Gakiya, it is still “just getting started” in the “structural laundering” process.

The origins

The CCP was born in 1993 in a Sao Paulo prison with the mission to protect its members from “corrupt and oppressors” of the prison system.

Its principles and rules were collected in a statute registered and published in 1997 in the Official Gazette of the State of Sao Paulo with the slogan “freedom, justice and peace“and the commitment to” shake up the system “to the point of” humanizing “national prison policy.

Three decades later, the organization seeking to reclaim prisoners’ rights became one of the most dangerous and best organized in South America.

Unlike the narcos of Rio de Janeiro, the CCP sand was involved in regulating crime and promoting peace among his “brothers” in order to ensure its structure and avoid divisions within it, academic and researcher Milton Lahuerta told EFE.

It then proceeded to act with a strict code of conduct and a strict hierarchyat the top of which is Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as “Marcola”, currently being held in a maximum security prison.

However, after the isolation of 22 CCP leaders in February 2019, the leadership now lives on an internal struggle for the power that could “weaken” the organization.

“Perhaps it will turn it into a more violent, but more divided organization in the next few years,” underlines the prosecutor, who has also suffered death threats from the CCP.

EFE agency

PB