Members of Brazil’s largest criminal group—the First Capital Command—which has expanded throughout the region and now threatens Peru, Argentina, and Chile. It has more than 35,000 members and already controls large parts of the prisons in Paraguay and Bolivia. Photo from social media.
Sometimes the relationships between organized crime and capitalism become clear and transparent, giving us an opportunity to assess the current state of the system and where it is headed.
A few days ago, the Brazilian federal government launched a massive operation against organized crime in the fuel sector, with surprising results. It identified 40 real estate investment funds worth $5.5 billion, controlled by the First Capital Commando (PCC), the largest drug trafficking group in Brazil. These funds financed the purchase of a port terminal, four refining plants, 1,600 fuel transport trucks, and more than 100 properties (https://goo.su/Chmn3).
In addition, they purchased properties worth another $5 billion and a shadow bank belonging to the organization, the Fintech BK Bank, which moved up to $8 billion. More than 1,000 gas stations in ten Brazilian states are used to launder organized crime money, but it is estimated that the PCC’s operations reach up to 2,500 gas stations nationwide.
The PCC was founded in 1993 in the Taubaté prison in São Paulo. Today, it operates in 90 percent of prisons and has spread to Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Colombia. It is the largest criminal gang in Latin America, with a potential 40,000 members, many of them in prisons. Through cocaine trafficking, it has established alliances with the Italian ‘Ndrangheta and is believed to have strong support in African and European countries.
What investigations in recent years have revealed is a growing sophistication in its money laundering operations, as well as its involvement in online gambling websites and investments in soccer clubs. The current investigation revealed that the PCC dominates the sugarcane chain through the purchase of farms, refining plants, fuel stations, and transportation.
The above data clearly reveals the close relationship between “traditional” business and organized crime. This reality deserves further investigation.
On the one hand, we observe how crime adopts the methods of large capitalist entrepreneurs. They invest with the same logic, seeking to monopolize each sector to maximize profits. The so-called organized crime is part of capitalism, from which it differs only in that its activities are not considered legal, which allows it to exponentially increase its profits. The methods of crime are identical to those of extractivism, as can be seen in mining.
On the other hand, a broad gray area emerges between what is legal and what is illegal: criminals seek to legalize their capital by investing in land, real estate, mining, and, above all, finance because it is the best way to launder their assets. “Legal” businesses adopt mafia-like methods by evading taxes (something that is now the norm in any sector), supported by specialists such as lawyers and notaries.
While crime moves toward legalization, traditional entrepreneurs move toward illegalization. Both seek to buy off judges and politicians, invest in sports and anything that allows them to circumvent difficulties and increase profits. They neutralize the state or take it by storm, buying goodwill or using threats, depending on the situation.
For all these reasons, in many regions, mining companies and organized crime work together to displace communities they consider an obstacle to the exploitation of Mother Earth.
If we accept that existing capitalism is a war of dispossession against the people — the “Fourth World War,” as the Zapatistas call it — we must also accept that there is nothing illegal in wars, since the law of the mightiest rules. Gaza is the best example of the evaporation of all legality, of all humanity, because it is about dispossessing and displacing the Palestinian people to turn their territories and lands into mere commodities.
Crime operates exactly the same in Cherán, in Chicomuselo, or anywhere in the world, because we, the people, we human beings, have become an obstacle to the endless accumulation of capital. Therefore, from now on, genocide will be the norm, as it was during the Conquest of America.
It is an irresponsible and perverse attitude to spread the idea that a “good” capitalism can exist, as progressive presidents in this region have repeatedly stated.
As Immanuel Wallerstein noted, capitalism was an enormous setback for two-thirds of humanity: women, girls, and boys, peoples of the color of the earth. What follows are crematoria, genocides, and the mainstream media that disguise this reality.
Any form of politics that fails to warn people that we are in the era of genocides, or that they are occurring in other latitudes, leads them to the gallows. As the workers’ movement historian Georges Haupt pointed out, anyone who entertains the people with captivating stories, “is as criminal as the geographer who draws false maps for navigators.”
Original article by Raúl Zibechi at La Jornada, September 6th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.