United States designates two Brazilian criminal gangs as terrorist organizations

The United States will add two of Brazil’s most powerful organized crime gangs, Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations effective June 5, the State Department announced. In addition, Washington has designated both groups as Specially Designated Global Terrorists as of this Thursday, adding them to a list that includes Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Hezbollah.

The announcement comes four months before Brazil’s presidential election and shakes up an electoral process likely to pit leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The move is a setback for Lula’s administration, which opposed such a step because it could open the door to U.S. military intervention in the South American country or to sanctions on banks that, unknowingly, do business with members of those groups.

The inclusion of the two gangs was announced just two days after U.S. President Donald Trump met privately with Flávio Bolsonaro in the Oval Office. According to the senator, during that conversation the presidential hopeful had asked the Republican to add the two groups to the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The president replied that he would consider it.

Less than three weeks earlier, Trump had also met in the Oval Office with Lula, with whom he spent three and a half hours and shared lunch. In that meeting, the former union leader explained to the Republican why, in his view, taking that step against the two criminal gangs would be a grave mistake: Brazil is willing to collaborate in the fight against criminal groups but opposes having those gangs included on U.S. terrorism lists. The government argues that such a designation would conflict with domestic law, which treats these gangs as profit-driven criminal networks rather than ideology-driven organizations, and would undermine national sovereignty.

In a statement distributed via social media, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the PCC and Comando Vermelho two of “the most violent criminal organizations in Brazil,” saying their influence and connections extend throughout Latin America and into the United States. Together they command thousands of members and have carried out “brutal attacks” against police officers, officials, and civilians, the State Department said.

“The Trump Administration will continue to use all available tools to protect our nation and our national security interests by keeping illicit drugs ​off our streets and disrupting the revenue streams funding violent narco-terrorists,” Rubio said.

With this step, the PCC and Comando Vermelho join an increasingly long list of drug-trafficking organizations in Latin America that have been added to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. The inclusion of the Cartel of the Suns — a label used for Venezuelan officials and figures who benefited from trafficking during the Hugo Chávez era — and the designation of Nicolás Maduro as its leader served the Trump administration as a legal argument to justify the military operation that captured the Venezuelan president on the outskirts of Caracas on January 3. Maduro was flown on a military plane to New York, where he is being held pending trial.

Designating these kinds of criminal gangs as terrorist organizations has also been used by the Trump administration to justify bombing what it describes as narco-speedboats in international waters in the Caribbean or the eastern Pacific, actions that experts and Democratic lawmakers describe as extrajudicial killings. To date, the U.S. government has not publicly presented evidence confirming that those vessels or their crews had ties to drug trafficking.

Letter from members of Congress

Earlier this month, a group of Democratic lawmakers led by Representative Jim McGovern sent a letter to Rubio urging him to reject including the two groups on the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. “We are concerned the Trump Administration’s overuse and weaponization of Foreign Terrorist Organization designations without meeting the clear statutory threshold for terrorist activity could weaken efforts to thwart organized crime in our hemisphere,” the members wrote. “Moreover, given the Administration’s use of terrorist designations as a justification to commit extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, we are concerned by how the Administration may use such a designation.”

The lawmakers also note that the Trump administration has previously used sanctions to interfere in Brazil’s internal affairs. They cite, for example, sanctions imposed on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes after the magistrate convicted Jair Bolsonaro of attempting a coup following the 2022 election that handed victory to Lula.

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