Brazil’s First Capital Command, or PCC, has expanded from a prison gang founded in Sao Paulo state in 1993 into what authorities describe as the largest criminal group in the Americas, with some 40,000 members and affiliates operating in nearly 30 countries, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The group’s rise has made it a growing threat to international efforts to combat organized crime, with Brazilian prosecutors urging U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to designate the PCC a Foreign Terrorist Organization, according to the Journal. 

Unlike more visibly violent Latin American trafficking groups, the PCC has cultivated a low-profile, businesslike model, using a strict internal code, legal support networks, and diversified money-laundering channels that authorities say include churches, gas stations, fintech firms, real-estate funds, car dealerships, and construction companies, according to the report. 

The PCC’s core business remains cocaine, but U.S. authorities have increasingly identified its footprint inside the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the group in 2021 and in 2024 froze the assets of Diego Goncalves do Carmo, accused of laundering roughly $240 million for the organization, the WSJ said. Investigators have separately identified affiliates in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Tennessee, among other states.  

In Massachusetts, federal prosecutors last year charged 18 Brazilians allegedly linked to the PCC in a firearms trafficking case that also involved fentanyl in one instance, the Journal said. 

The group emerged from brutal Brazilian prison conditions and expanded after authorities transferred inmates across the country, a move that helped it establish new cells nationwide and entrench its power in overcrowded prisons where leaders were able to continue directing operations from behind bars, the newspaper said. 

Outside prison walls, the PCC has pushed deep into the Amazon to secure direct access to cocaine routes from Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, cutting out intermediaries and extending control over remote communities where residents say traffickers now operate parallel justice systems, according to the report. 

That expansion has fueled turf wars with Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command and its allies, while helping the PCC move drugs through river routes, aircraft, and ports to Atlantic shipping lanes bound for West Africa and Europe, where Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Hamburg have become major destinations. Much of the cocaine flow to Europe has passed through the Port of Santos, Latin America’s biggest container port, the Journal said. 

The PCC now functions less like a traditional cartel than as a decentralized criminal marketplace, forging alliances with Italy’s ’Ndrangheta, Japan’s Yakuza, and Albanian and Serbian gangs in West Africa while remaining resilient despite the long imprisonment of its best-known leader, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as Marcola. 

Brazilian officials told the WSJ that they no longer speak in terms of eliminating the PCC, but of managing its coexistence with the state, amid mounting concern over the gang’s infiltration of legitimate business and politics. 

Read more at The Wall Street Journal