THE RISE OF THE RED COMMAND
The city didn’t leave me time to settle.
The first sign of unrest was easy to overlook. It came on Tuesday, November 9, my second day on the job, just a short news brief tucked into the crime pages of O Globo, Rio’s main newspaper. It told of a violent carjacking in Jacarepaguá, a neighborhood in the far west of town. Four men armed with shotguns and pistols used their Peugeot to force a man in a Volkswagen to pull over. It was 7 a.m., and the driver, a pharmacist, was so scared he skidded up the sidewalk and smashed his car against a tree. He stepped out, as ordered. The men drenched the car with alcohol and set it on fire. Then they returned to the road and stopped the next motorist, a furnace operator driving a Chevrolet. They took the driver’s cell phone from his pocket, doused his car, and set it on fire. The victims were baffled: “They didn’t want to steal anything. They didn’t even want my credit cards,” the furnace operator said.
Within the next couple of days, the hit-and-run attacks began to show a pattern. On Wednesday morning at seven o’clock, five armed men stopped two drivers in northern Rio, took their cell phones, and torched the cars. That night, two men on a motorcycle threw Molotov cocktails into cars parked near the subway stop where I got off in the morning, on my way to the AP office.
This attack was close, but it was more worrisome for what it represented within the context of Rio. The neighborhood of Flamengo, a staid residential area on the south side of the city, was usually off-limits to warring gangs. A hit in these quiet street signaled this was not business as usual.
After the Flamengo attack, the gangsters began to strike all over town, first cars, then buses. The burning hulks were meant to snarl traffic and spread panic as the perpetrators melted back into the chaos. No one had died—yet. But the flames left the city on edge.
The experts I interviewed—former law enforcement officers, academics—said these attacks were likely a reaction the government’s initial efforts to make Rio safer. Under a new security program, heavily armed police invaded gang-controlled favelas, but only after warning the population. This allowed gangsters to flee, but it also reduced bloodshed, in a radical break with the old approach—fast, guns-blazing raids that often left bodies in their wake. The biggest difference came once the officers were inside. Under this new program, they stayed, and set up permanent bases with round-the-clock patrols. These special policing groups were called Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, or Pacification Police Units—UPPs for short.
The UPP program didn’t end drug traffic, but it reasserted the state’s presence in favelas where the gangsters had lived and run their businesses virtually unchecked. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.
When I landed in Rio in November 2010, there were twelve of these units in place and a thirteenth planned for the end of the month. They were a drop in the sea of more than one thousand favelas, but pinpointing them on a map made it clear that law enforcement had a strategy. The targets were in key areas, around the principal sports arena and the upscale parts of town. Most of the UPPs were in the city’s south side, bracketing Copacabana, rubbing shoulders with Ipanema.
Now the gangs were pushing back.
I churned out the standard thousand-word articles for the AP about the attacks: the usual who-what-when-where-why, weaving in the requisite quotes by frightened residents, filing the story.
But as I sat alone in my office at night, staring at the scenes flashing on the small television—flames leaping from busted bus windows, the rictus of fear on the face of commuters—I was struck by how little I understood the forces tearing at Rio.
I knew the Red Command was first among these criminal networks in scope and power. I remembered its initial forays; the gangsters’ bravado had left a strong impression on me as a teenager. About Rio’s police I knew only enough to be wary of their methods. Now there were signs these forces were gearing up for a confrontation unlike any the city had seen.
Over the next three weeks, the conflict would leave dozens of people dead and more than a hundred buses and cars burning. In that short time I’d learn the peculiar Brazilian formula that determined which lives and which deaths counted and which would not be part of the tally, even when one of the bodies in question had just been heaped onto a gurney, warm and bleeding before my eyes.
Even as I covered the conflict, I realized that to really understand the balance of power in the city and to grasp what was at stake, I needed to fill in the gaps left by my years away. This meant reconstructing the history of the Red Command and of its influence on Rio, from the gang’s origins to the moment when I returned and found buses on fire in public streets.
This mattered not only because of the November 2010 attacks, but because the gang’s evolution was entwined with Rio’s own. Its rise over the past forty years was intrinsically connected to the escalation of the drug trade and the armed violence that shaped this place, its culture, and its landscape.
This new UPP security program was a threat to the Red Command’s core. The fallout would determine important aspects of life in Rio for years to come, years in which the city would host World Cup events and the Olympics. To understand what was at stake and gauge the consequences, I had to understand the Red Command.
This is the gang’s story. In many ways, it is also the story of Rio.
The criminal organization that would one day strike terror in Rio was born in one of the most beautiful corners of the state: Ilha Grande, a pristine island of forested mountains skirted by beaches and fishing villages, about one hundred miles off Rio de Janeiro’s southern coast. Even today Ilha Grande has few roads and cars. Abraão, the island’s main settlement, barely registers as a town. It is a cluster of homes and pensions scattered along the dozen or so streets that spread at cockeyed angles from the dock.
It was on the island’s ocean-facing side, where the waves are roughest, that one of Rio’s most notorious prisons once stood. The institution that would later be known as Cândido Mendes Penal Institute was first established as a penal colony in 1903. Because it was so remote, it became a dumping ground for dangerous criminals and political prisoners.
Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, sent there in 1936 on charges of “communist subversion,” described its filth and the violence in his memoirs. “Simple mention of the God-forsaken place froze conversations and darkened faces,” he wrote.
Conditions were so loathsome inmates nicknamed it “the Devil’s Cauldron.”
By the time I moved to Rio, the prison had been shut down and its inmates scattered.I But one man could answer my questions about the gang’s origin: William da Silva Lima. He was there at the beginning.
He did time in Ilha Grande starting in 1968 for robbing a bank, and was back again in 1974. Old mug shots and prison records show he was a slight man with a thick black beard, a receding hairline, and a long rap sheet. Beyond the bank robberies, he had convictions for kidnapping, extortion, and handling stolen goods. His calm demeanor and intellectual bent earned him the trust of other inmates; he wrote many of their petitions and letters and acted as their go-between with authorities. In return they gave him the nickname he still carries: Professor.
The Professor was seventy-one when we met. By way of introduction he showed me his scars, now spidery marks on his crepe-paper skin. The uneven knuckles on his left hand came from a time he was tied to his cell bars and beaten with a stick. The dent on the back of his head had the shape of a metal rod; it was the revenge of a guard after one of his many escape attempts.
“But I survived,” he said, sitting down at a well-worn dinner table in his modest Copacabana apartment. “Many more didn’t.”
His body was broken from his forty-odd years in prison, his speech was slurred, but his mind held the stories I’d come for. These he spun with little prompting—tales of his first crime, an embezzlement carried off to perfection when he was fourteen, of famous cellmates, of his four prison escapes.
He also spoke of the prison—an overcrowded, disease-ridden hell ruled over by authorities who made no pretense of reforming those who landed there. The food was never enough; there were no mattresses, no blankets, no uniforms, no cleaning supplies unless inmates bought these themselves. Men slept on the floor and fought off the rats that crawled from the open pits that served as toilets. Insects feasted on the naked flesh, leaving prisoners with swollen limbs and suppurating wounds. Guards, lacking enough guns and munitions and given free rein by distant prison authorities, improvised methods of keeping control. These included beatings, electric shocks, inventive forms of torture.
Guards terrorized the inmates, but so did other prisoners. Groups of inmates robbed and raped newcomers; prisoners killed each other over differences they brought from the outside, internal rivalries, or for pay. The inmates, the Professor said, were their own worst enemies.
It was within these perpetually humid cells, described by another former inmate as “walls that weep,” that Brazil’s military dictatorship stashed political prisoners found guilty of trying to overthrow the regime. Many were convicted under a catch-all Lei de Segurança Nacional, or National Security Law, passed in 1968, so prison records referred to them as the LSN prisoners, or simply, the politicals.
This group of convicts included student leaders, priests, academics, and union organizers; up to ninety-two of them were held at a time in the penitentiary’s Gallery B between 1969 and 1975, alongside more than 850 common criminals. When a bank robber like the Professor was thrown into the same gallery, he found himself in daily contact with the firebrands who’d been advocating the overthrow of government.
The ideologues were impressive to the thieves and kidnappers with whom they shared quarters. They maintained within prison the same discipline they followed outside: a routine of regular study, collective decision-making, and obeisance to rules of conduct. Their presence began to change the prison: they curtailed robbery and rape, and led hunger strikes that gained the inmates better health care and better treatment for their visitors, who were routinely roughed up and shaken down by guards. They put the treats brought by their middle-class families into a collective pool and shared them.
These LSN prisoners brought more than lofty talk. Many were there for executing precisely planned bank robberies and high-profile kidnappings to finance their struggle against the military regime. They discussed the heists with the other prisoners as well. These conversations would later prove far more dangerous than the sticks the men sharpened into daggers on the rough concrete floor.II
From this stew of ideals, advice, and rebellion, the seeds of the Red Command began to germinate in Cândido Mendes’s cells. At first, they were no more than a prison gang focused on improving conditions on the inside. Some of the earliest documents connected to this gang that would later terrify the city were poignant letters sent to “brothers” on the outside asking for donations to the prison Christmas Party and signed with their motto, Paz, Justiça e Liberdade: Peace, Justice, and Liberty.
As the dictatorship eased up, the political prisoners were transferred to prisons with better conditions; by August 28, 1979, the generals decreed an amnesty for those charged with political crimes. Just a month later, the incipient Red Command staged a coup within prison walls that left six rival leaders dead and secured its control of the penitentiary. In his 1979 year-end report, the head of the prison informed state penal authorities that “after the murders of September 1979 . . . the LSN phalanx or Red Command began to rule the prison of Ilha Grande and control organized crime in all of Rio’s penitentiary system.” His succinct account named the gang for the first time in an official document; it also recognized that they were no longer confined to the island prison.
The veneer of idealism that had inspired the gang’s motto began to fade soon after the political prisoners were released. The men retained only the certainty that they were stronger together, and that they lived within a system whose rewards they couldn’t hope to attain. Instead of fighting to change that system, however, the gang would organize itself in the years to come to wrench from it what it wanted: money, power, and visibility.
By the end of the 1970s, the Professor said, “what they called ‘Red Command’ could not be destroyed easily: it was a way of behaving, of surviving adversity.”
The gang had risen within the penal system, but few outside the inner circles of law enforcement had ever heard its name. That changed on Friday, April 3, 1981, when the Red Command burst with a spasm of blood and bullets into Brazilian living rooms through the nightly news.
The police had been investigating a series of spectacular bank robberies—well-planned, precisely timed heists in which a group worked together to disrupt traffic, hit a string of banks, and melt away . . . the sort of thing the leftist guerrillas had pulled off in years past.
That April evening, a tipster pointed novice detectives to a north-side housing complex, saying the bank robbers had been hiding out there. The plainclothes investigation went dramatically awry. During the all-night shoot-out that followed—all of it covered on national news—a handful of men held hundreds of officers at bay. From their perch inside a third-floor apartment, the gangsters deployed a frightening arsenal and displayed an audacity that no one would forget.
Throughout the night, their leader shouted taunts at the cops below: “Come and get me, you bastards! This is the Red Command.” He was José Jorge Saldanha, known as Zé Bigode, or Mustache Joe; at thirty-eight years old, he had twelve bank robberies to his name and had done time in Ilha Grande before escaping in 1980. An undated mug shot showed a man between black and white who looked at the camera through lowered eyelids, head tilted slightly back, with a dark mustache that hung over the top half of his mouth but left the lower, fleshy lip unguarded.
The standoff lasted eleven hours; by the time a 12-gauge bullet left a gurgling hole in Zé Bigode’s chest, three officers were dead and half a dozen injured. Awe for the gang’s skill and fearlessness breathed through the lines of the newspaper articles that ran the following day. To one downed officer’s plea—“Get me out of here, please”—came Zé Bigode’s mockery: “I’ve got a bullet for each one of you!”
The head of state security gave an interview that revealed the gangsters’ arsenal was far beyond what the police could access. “We’re in inferior conditions,” he said. “Our weapons are only those allowed by law.”
A photographer for O Globo captured the essence of that episode in one last photo of Zé Bigode. In the foreground was the body of the gangster, thin and shirtless, flung face up and arms akimbo on a dirt path of the housing complex lawn. The dark bulk of armed, uniformed police officers loomed over him. The episode became known as quatrocentos contra um, or four hundred against one.
This paroxysm of violence and daring became seared in the city’s collective memory. It marked the public debut of the Comando Vermelho, or CV, an entity that would haunt Rio for years to come.
Over the next decade, the Red Command expanded its reach. One of Rio’s particularities helped the group’s spread: the favelas that climbed steep hillsides and blanketed stretches of suburbia. These communities, which often started as informal squatter settlements, were physically wedged within the metropolis and tied to it by the daily ebb and flow of residents who worked and studied beyond their borders, but they lacked access to even the most basic services. Residents rigged up their own electrical hookups and running water. Garbage collectors and mail delivery never climbed the morro, the hill; neither did the police, unless it was to look for suspects of crimes on the asfalto, the asphalt, slang for the formal city with its paved streets. Cariocas grew used to thinking of their city in these confining terms: the morro and the asfalto. Rio was the cidade partida, the divided city.III
Within these favelas, the Red Command found room to grow unchecked. One corner of northern Rio in particular brought together conditions that made it ideal as headquarters: the Complexo do Alemão, a cluster of fifteen communities that joined in a sprawling patchwork and spread over the hills.
This region had once been an industrial center. The first modest housing developments went up around the inauguration of the Curtume Carioca, the Carioca Tannery, a pretty Art Deco building with soaring windows and imperial palms along its sidewalks. It opened in 1920 and anchored industry in the area. From atop one of the granite peaks nearby, a quaint little colonial church, Our Lady of Penha, watched over the thriving working-class neighborhood below.
In the early 1950s, a Polish immigrant with a last name no one could pronounce—Leonard Kaczmarkiewicz—and who owned some of this land carved up the property for sale. New arrivals called him the Alemão, the German, because of his European appearance and his tongue-twister of a last name. The settlement became known as Morro do Alemão, the German’s Hill.
Fueled by federal policy, Brazil industrialized and urbanized at dizzying speed over the 1960 and 1970s. Buses arriving from the vast interior spilled entire families into Rio’s streets. Without affordable housing available, they made their own. Favelas grew apace, including those around the Morro do Alemão. Over time, the nearby settlements merged, and the resulting conglomeration of favelas became known as the Complexo do Alemão.
This densely populated maze was nearly impenetrable to outsiders. Gangsters on the run could fall back into the conjoined favelas and disappear. Lookouts—the fogueteiros, boys on the lowest rung of the traffic hierarchy—would set off fireworks to warn their bosses should the cops or an aspiring rival broach the perimeter. In the investigation that followed the shoot-out with Zé Bigode in 1981, police found a large stash of guns and ammunition hidden in the Morro do Adeus (Good-bye Hill) one of the peaks that make up the complex.
Alemão had another advantage: location. This network of favelas ran right up to the city’s main thoroughfare, Avenida Brasil, and sat less than ten miles from the port and the international airport. Later, when two new highways plowed over the landscape to ease the perennially jammed traffic—the Linha Vermelha and the Linha Amarela—the city’s three main arteries formed a confluence within easy reach.
Inside these favelas, the Red Command was untouchable. From this safe base, the gang could stage robberies in the asfalto and run a side business in marijuana, which they sold in drug retail outlets within the favelas known as bocas de fumo.
Then cocaine came to town. The new drug hit Rio in the early 1980s; it upped the game and the stakes. Marijuana was cheap; cocaine was a highly profitable enterprise with international ramifications. Running it was a complex business that required transportation and distribution channels, packaging sites and sales points, plus a specialized army of lookouts, carriers, soldiers, and moneymen. It would change the Red Command and it would change Rio.
With more money to spend, and more money to be made, gangsters began to import weapons more powerful than any the police had seen, and to move aggressively into new territory.
Control of favelas was more important than ever. Local drug bosses often self-consciously stepped into the role that should have been played by government, securing the loyalty of residents and strengthening their grasp on the community. A Red Command man known as Pianinho described this to the Jornal do Brasil newspaper on December 10, 1984:
We, former bank robbers who have now entered the drug trade, educate the favelados and show them that the government isn’t worth a damn, and won’t do anything for them. Then we give them food, medication, clothes, school supplies, uniforms for the kids, even cash. We pay for doctors, for funerals, and we don’t let the favelados leave for any reason. We even resolve fights between husbands and wives within the favela, to avoid messy situations that would require the police to come in.
By the mid-1980s, little over a decade after the Red Command’s origin in the Devil’s Cauldron, nothing happened within a gang-controlled community without the gangsters’ authorization, whether it was the construction of a soccer field with federal funds or of a child-care center by a nonprofit organization.
It didn’t take long for the rest of Rio to realize something unprecedented was happening in the hills. There were vicious clashes in south-side favelas like Vidigal, Chapéu Mangueira, and Pavão-Pavãozinho, which rose right by upscale neighborhoods like Copacabana, Leblon, and Ipanema. By the early 1990s, the taunt Zé Bigode had flung out of that third-floor window—“This is the Red Command!”—echoed around Rio; their tag—CV, for Comando Vermelho—was spread throughout hundreds of favelas.
Their headquarters were in Alemão, which made the favela complex a focal point of violence. By 2010, life expectancy within the complex was sixty-five—nine years lower than Rio’s average.IV
Back at the Professor’s apartment, our conversation was winding down. It was nearing dinnertime and his family began to trickle in: his daughter, his grandkids, and his wife, an attorney he met in Ilha Grande when he was already an inmate and she was a young law school intern with perfectly arched eyebrows and a lot of idealism.
It was time to go, but I had one last question. What did he think of the Red Command now? As he described the values the gang espoused in its early days, I’d wondered whether there was any shred of connection left between this man and his once-upon-a-time group of jailbirds who organized Christmas parties and lived by the motto of Peace, Justice, and Liberty and the gang that held Rio in its grip decades later.
He shook his head. He no longer recognized the Red Command. It had morphed into a monster.
I. The prison compound was torn down in 1994. No one bothered to salvage its records, which were only dug up in 2002. I found them years later in the state archives, unsorted but rich in details. In 2009, a modest museum was raised where the prison had stood. It displays minutes of prisoner meetings, prison memos, and other documents from the Red Command’s first few years, such as letters from gang members in prison to their “brothers” outside that signed off with “A family united will never be vanquished.”
II. The political prisoners also shared their books. Some of them offered inmates a new perspective on their lives; some taught the specifics of guerilla warfare. Among the publications apprehended within the prison were Portuguese translations of Wilfred G. Burchett’s Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War, Ernesto Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, and the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, by the Brazilian communist Carlos Marighella.
III. The term “cidade partida” was further disseminated when it became the title of a 1994 book of reportage by journalist Zuenir Ventura.
IV. This was due in large part to fact that young men in the area died at a rate of 85 per 100,000. In Barra da Tijuca, the well-to-do western neighborhood of gated condominiums where my parents lived, the death rate for young men was 4 per 100,000.