Comando Vermelho

• 1. Introduction

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  Comando Vermelho, the Red Command, is a Brazilian criminal organization with roots in a prison cell block, and in 2025 it became the target of one of the largest police operations Rio de Janeiro has seen. Before dawn on the 28th of October 2025, about 2,500 police officers entered 26 communities in the North Zone of the city. Most of the action centered on the Penha and Alemão neighborhoods. Their task was to carry out hundreds of warrants for the arrest of gang leaders.

  How did a gathering of convicts and political guerrillas, locked up together under a military regime, grow into an organization that governments now treat as a national security threat? Why did a group built for protection inside a prison turn to cocaine and control of whole neighborhoods? And why, decades later, does it still meet the state in open armed conflict?

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• 2. The Pit

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  The year the Red Command began is still disputed, but the place is not. It was the Cândido Mendes penal institute, a maximum-security prison on the island of Ilha Grande. Brazil's military dictatorship, in power since 1964, faced a stubborn challenge from leftist guerrillas, most of them middle-class intellectuals. In the early 1970s the government began jailing captured guerrillas beside ordinary criminals, hoping to strip the rebels of their political standing.

  Block B of Cândido Mendes had a grim reputation and a grim nickname: the Pit. Inmates there suffered regular abuse from fellow prisoners and from guards alike. So they banded together to protect one another from beatings and agreed on a code of conduct. The guerrillas also began teaching the common criminals about resistance, revolution and social justice.

  The code was meant to build loyalty, reduce violence among the prisoners and advance their shared cause. It still left each member free to act on his own initiative.

  William da Silva Lima arrived at Cândido Mendes in 1971 and became known as O Professor, the Professor. He had left school at 12 and was first arrested at 17. Behind bars he educated himself and acted as a spokesman for the prisoners, drafting petitions and letters to the authorities. Seeing himself as a social bandit, he helped create the faction's code. He would later write a memoir called Four Hundred Against One.

  Rogério Lemgruber was jailed on Ilha Grande in 1972 and met the Professor there. He helped organize the faction and, in January 1980, escaped the island by boat. He died on the 29th of May 1992 of liver failure and diabetes. Across Rio's favelas, his name was written on hundreds of walls.

  Prison officials tried to break up the alliance by moving its leaders to other wings and other prisons. That only carried the group's ideas through the wider prison system. The name came from the authorities too. One official used the words Comando Vermelho in a memo to colleagues, and the press picked it up before the prisoners adopted it as their own. An earlier name, Falange Vermelha, meant Red Phalanx.

  A political decision in 1979 would soon empty the prison of most of its guerrillas.

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• 3. Amnesty and Cocaine

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  President João Figueiredo took office in 1979 with a private fear. As Brazil edged toward democracy, he and fellow officers might one day face trial for human rights violations. He steered an amnesty movement to his own advantage and passed the sweeping 1979 Amnesty Law, which protected political prisoners and their government captors alike from prosecution. The guerrillas inside the Red Command walked free, and the group lost much of its ideological edge.

  Outside the walls, the group's reach was growing. Many of its early members were bank robbers, but the Command moved quickly into the booming cocaine market. Its members helped move drugs overseas for Colombian cartels and sold cocaine in Rio itself. The money was extraordinary. By the end of 1985, the gang already controlled 70% of the drug market in Rio's favelas.

  In the favelas it ruled, the Command also took on the work of a government. It acted as judge, banning theft, robbery and rape among residents. In return for their cooperation, it supplied school materials, medical equipment and food for the poor.

  The formal end of the military dictatorship in 1985 cut the last ties between the Command and the leftist guerrillas. Many of those former fighters returned to civilian life and rose through political parties, and some won elected office.

  The cocaine money that built the Command's reach would soon begin to pull it apart.

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• 4. Chain of Command

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  Estimates put the Red Command at as many as 30,000 members, which would make it the second-largest criminal organization in Brazil, behind the Primeiro Comando da Capital. Yet it has no single boss. Imprisoned senior leaders hold authority over the favela leaders, who are called donos, meaning owners. The donos send payments to the men in prison, a kind of insurance scheme. Members on the outside follow instructions and fund the leaders, and they are protected from retribution if they are ever captured.

  Below the donos sit the managers of the drug-selling points, called gerentes de boca, and the area managers, the gerentes de area. Seguranças and soldados guard the favela's territory and fight police and rivals. Vapors do the actual selling. At the bottom are the olheiros, fogueteiros and radinhos, who watch for police or rival gangs and sound the alarm with walkie-talkies or fireworks. Those lookouts are often young adults, teenagers or even children. The people who organize the fighters may be called generais or chefes de guerra, meaning generals or war chiefs.

  The scholar Penglase describes the Command as a loose association of traffickers who help one another but act with great independence. Members share an identity and a set of norms, yet each negotiates separately with suppliers known as matutos. That freedom goes back to Ilha Grande, where prisoners were forbidden to attack one another but could pursue their own business. Another unusual feature is that leaders may step away from the gang if they choose. Many comparable groups demand loyalty until death.

  Inside prisons where the Command is strong, senior leaders govern daily life. They settle disputes within the faction, including ones that began outside, and make the final call on matters of shared interest.

  In 2025, Rio de Janeiro state representative TH Joias was arrested as a preventive measure over alleged ties to the group. He was accused of serving as its arm inside the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro, known as Alerj.

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• 5. Splinters and Rivals

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  By the late 1980s the profits had made the Command's factions restless. Local leaders wanted larger shares, and some broke away. Terceiro Comando and Amigos dos Amigos both emerged from these splits, and the fights over territory in Rio sent violence sharply upward. The Terceiro Comando was itself the product of a power struggle between Red Command leaders in the mid-1980s.

  After the death of Pablo Escobar, the Command struck up a working relationship with the FARC, a Colombian guerrilla group that had moved into the cocaine trade. Luiz Fernando da Costa, nicknamed Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or Seaside Freddy, led the dealings. The Command obtained weapons and ammunition and delivered them to the FARC. In exchange, the FARC supplied cocaine. Colombian forces captured Beira-Mar after a shootout in 2001, and he was extradited to Brazil.

  Márcio dos Santos Nepomuceno, called Marcinho VP, took over as top leader after Beira-Mar's arrest in 2002. The shift followed a killing. Beira-Mar had murdered Ernaldo Pinto Medeiros, known as UÉ, the founder of Amigos dos Amigos. It was said to be revenge for the death of Orlando Jogador, an original Red Command leader whose murder UÉ was believed to have ordered.

  Elias Pereira da Silva, called Elias Maluco, or Crazy Elias, was one of Rio's most powerful dealers until his arrest in 2002 for the murder of the well-known journalist Tim Lopes. He was found hanged in his cell on the 22nd of September 2020. Nobody knows whether he took his own life or was killed and the scene staged.

  Farther from Rio, Roni Peixoto, called Gordo, or Fat Man, led the Command in Minas Gerais during the 2000s as Beira-Mar's right-hand man. He is credited with introducing crack to Belo Horizonte, the state capital, which may have led to his brutal murder in 2022.

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• 6. Pacification and After

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  In 2008, Rio's state police launched a strategy called Pacification, inspired by community-oriented policing. It moved in stages. First came an occupation of a chosen favela with overwhelming force. Then a permanent Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, or UPP, was installed and stayed after the troops left. The UPPs were not meant to end the drug trade. Their main job was to protect residents from gang violence.

  The early years of 2008-2010 brought 40 UPP battalions into 200 communities, and the state counted it as a success. The Red Command suddenly stopped fighting state forces and gave up significant ground. One operation put the Command's principal stronghold in government hands for the first time in more than a generation.

  Then the system wore down. Corruption and over-expansion eroded the program, and by 2013 it was breaking down. Clashes between the Command and the state surged again. The researcher Lessing observes that almost nowhere else in Brazil, or much of the world, have cartels fought the state in the open for so long. Violence by state forces, according to the monitoring group ACLED, accounts for a disproportionate share of reported deaths in Rio. One suggested explanation is how conditional the state's crackdowns are. Violence fell when Pacification targeted violent behavior and returned when it faded.

  In 2016 a 20-year truce between the Command and the Primeiro Comando da Capital, a rival based in São Paulo, collapsed, and violence rose further. On the 19th of November 2016, small arms fire brought down a Rio police helicopter during a clash with Command members. It crashed in a ditch, and all four officers aboard were killed. In June 2018, Command members attacked a Bolivian Army base in Porvenir and a Brazilian police station in Epitaciolandia. In both attacks they stole weapons and ammunition.

  Militias are another growing threat in Rio. These armed groups are formed by current and former police officers who say they are fighting crime, and they now control substantial territory. Clashes between gangs and militias caused 28% of reported deaths in Rio in 2020 and 2021. In July and August 2022, the Command fought the Campinho police militia for control of the Morro do Fuba community in the North Zone.

  Far to the north, the Amazon has become a new battlefield. The Colombia-Brazil-Peru tri-border region offers valuable trafficking routes. The Command, the Primeiro Comando da Capital, Familia do Norte and Colombian militia groups, including the Border Command and the Carolina Ramirez Front, have fought for it, and regional deaths have climbed. Cláudio Augusto da Silva Duarte, called Mano C, leads the Command in Pará, and Ocimar Prado Junior, called Coquinho, leads it in Amazonas.

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• 7. Funk and Film

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  Every Sunday, according to the account of one scholar, the Red Command throws funk parties known as bailes funk. Funk carioca is a Brazilian style of music derived from Miami bass, and its popularity with young Brazilians makes it a recruiting tool. The group is known to have paid for parties to draw in boys and girls for drug dealing. It also sponsors neighborhood associations, special interest clubs and sporting events.

  The Command also pays funk artists to record songs, and even whole CDs, that praise the group and honor its dead. Because the Command funds the production, the recordings are often polished and of high technical quality. Pirate radio stations play them, and hundreds of street vendors in Rio and São Paulo sell them. The genre is called Proibidão, meaning extremely prohibited, because of limits on where it can be sold and who can broadcast it.

  The Professor's memoir, Four Hundred Against One: A History of the Red Commando, was adapted twice by the director Caco Souza. The first was the 2004 documentary Senhora Liberdade, and the second was the 2010 feature film 400 against 1 - A History of Organized Crime. Daniel de Oliveira played the Professor, having already played Cazuza in a biopic. Daniela Escobar also starred, and the singer Negra Li made a special appearance. The film Quase Dois Irmãos, also from 2004, dramatized the bond between common prisoners and political prisoners.

  In 2006, the docuseries Ross Kemp on Gangs devoted an episode, titled Rio De Janeiro, to the Command and its police opponents. The film City of God never names the faction. Yet its setting, the community of Cidade de Deus, is controlled by the Command in real life. The film's DVD includes an extra documentary, News from a Personal War, with interviews of police officers and local children from the favelas. The 2009 documentary Dancing with the Devil, by director Jon Blair, also examines Rio's criminal organizations, including the Red Command.

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• 8. Operation Containment

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  Police counted 93 rifles seized, 121 people killed and 133 arrested in Operation Containment, known in Portuguese as Operação Contenção. Gangs set barricades on fire and used bombs dropped from drones against special forces teams. Governor Cláudio Castro said the dead were criminals and called the operation a success. Some residents, along with national and international civil society groups, criticized how lethal the police had been. They questioned the claim that every victim was a criminal.

  The toll made it the deadliest police action in the state's history in a favela, surpassing the 2021 Jacarezinho shootout, which killed 28 people. It was also the deadliest in Brazilian history overall, exceeding the 1992 Carandiru massacre, in which 111 inmates died in a prison riot.

  The Command's reputation now reaches well past Brazil's borders. In 2025, the Argentine government under Javier Milei declared the Command and the Primeiro Comando da Capital to be narcoterrorist organizations. That October, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich announced both groups had been added to RePET, a registry of people and entities linked to terrorism. The Rio de Janeiro state government sent a report to the United States asking that the factions receive the same label. Paraguay followed Argentina, and both countries reinforced their borders with Brazil.

  On the 28th of May 2026, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated both groups as Specially Designated Global Terrorists. From the 5th of June, they were also listed as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

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