12/20/23, 2:18 PM ‘The PCC are after me’: the drug cartel with Paraguay in its clutches | Paraguay

raguay in its clutches | Paraguay | The Guardian

Paraguay in its clutches

A Brazilian former prison gang is
threatening to turn its neighbour into a
narcostate and its deadly tentacles extend
much further
by Laurence Blair in Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay

F
ahd Jamil Georges went by many names: the Turk, the Godfather, Boss
Thu 23 Jun 2022 10.00 BST
of Bosses, the King of the Border. Over five decades, he went from
running casinos to smuggling guns and drugs into Brazil from Paraguay
– South America’s top marijuana producer, and a key transit point for
Andean cocaine.

His former mansion in Ponta Porã, Brazil – modelled on Elvis Presley’s Graceland
– is wreathed in barbed wire and electric fencing. His Cadillac boasted reinforced
tyres, and bulletproof screens shielded his bed. He counted presidents and
dictators on both sides of the border as close associates.

But in the end, this protection counted for little. When Jamil, 80, handed himself
in to Paraguayan authorities in April last year after years on the run, he singled
out the dangerous new player in town: “The PCC are after me.”

Jamil was perhaps the final domino to fall in “Project Paraguay”, a decade-
long hostile takeover of this lucrative narco-trafficking pipeline by the Primeiro
Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, or PCC) – a violent Brazilian cartel
founded in a São Paulo jail in 1993, whose reach is fast spreading across South
Fahd Jamil America and even globally.
Georges. Photograph:
Internet The PCC’s triumph in Paraguay has coincided with a wave of contract killings, with
the latest victims including the mayor of the neighbouring Paraguayan town of
Pedro Juan Caballero, a top anti-mafia prosecutor who was shot dead while on his
honeymoon on a Colombian beach, and, on Sunday, the former boss of the
country’s largest prison.

The bloodletting has fuelled fears that international drug

cartels in league with corrupt officials are turning comparatively tranquil Paraguay
into a violent narcostate.

Since “The Turk” surrendered, “the PCC have taken over completely,” said Lt Col
Ozevaldo Santos de Melo, a military police officer in Ponta Porã.

Jamil’s downfall follows the relentless elimination of the PCC’s other rivals. In
June 2016, Jorge Rafaat – a powerful drug trafficker and sometime Jamil ally –
was shot dead in Pedro Juan Caballero. About 40 of his associates were
subsequently murdered.

The PCC soon afterwards declared war on Comando Vermelho (CV), another
Brazilian cartel, emerging victorious as the largest player in the transport of drugs
into Brazil – and on to Europe, where the ’Ndrangheta Calabrian mafia handles
distribution.

Jamil was linked to several murders, but largely kept a lid on border violence, said
Santos de Melo. “The Turk was always discreet, and not so aggressive,” he argued.
“The PCC are more violent … they have no scruples. They kill innocents.”

With figures such as Jamil and Rafaat out of the picture, drive-by shootings
among small-time criminals and rivals within the PCC have become more
common, said Cristian Amarilla, intelligence director for Senad, Paraguay’s anti-
drug force.

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12/20/23, 2:18 PM
Agents of the Paraguayan
national anti-drug department
(Senad) find marijuana bags at a
plantation. Photograph: Norberto
Duarte/Internet
Marcos Camacho, AKA Marcola,
leader of First Capital Command
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/23/paraguay-pcc-brazilian-drug-cartel
‘The PCC are after me’: the drug cartel with Paraguay in its clutches | Paraguay | The Guardian
“It’s a mess,” he said, showing the Guardian around a seized luxury rural property,
complete with artificial lake and floodlit football pitch, apparently designed to
serve as a hotel for visiting Brazilian crime lords. “Today, the border is in flux.
Everyone is trafficking.”
The population of Pedro Juan Caballero is just 120,000, but its murder rate –
more than 70 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 – is comparable to that of Caracas.
Amambay – the Paraguayan region containing the town – is home to just 2% of
Paraguay’s population but was scene to a third of the country’s 481 homicides in
2020.
At the London Pub in Pedro Juan Caballero – which sells cold English ales and is
decorated with mannequins wearing bearskins – customers are often armed,
making calling time a nerve-racking proposition, said David Ovelar, a barman.
“We’re on constant alert,” he added.
The PCC has a “strong” or “intermittent” presence across six of Paraguay’s 17
regions, and has carried out dramatic bank robberies in several more, according to
InSight Crime, a thinktank. In a sign of its growing control over Paraguay’s
prisons, 75 PCC members escaped from custody in Pedro Juan Caballero in
January 2020 – some tunnelling out, others simply walking out the front door.
But Zully Rolón, the director of Senad, said claims that Paraguay is
fast becoming a narcostate were exaggerated. “We’re not Colombia or Mexico, far
from it,” she argued.
Rolón denied that the PCC had been able to establish a Paraguayan foothold,
pointing to the recent extradition of several cartel bosses to Brazil.
But Paraguay still has no radar coverage of its vast north, making it almost
impossible to intercept cocaine-laden planes dispatched by the PCC from Bolivia,
Rolón admitted.
“If we had technology, our work would be a lot easier,” she added.
And when a cartel leader gets arrested, said Santos de Melo, “the PCC just send
another one from São Paulo”.
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12/20/23, 2:18 PM
(PCC). Photograph: Sérgio
Lima/AFP/Getty Images
Paraguayan army soldiers are
seen next to an army tank near a
border prison in Pedro Juan
Caballero. Photograph: Gabriel
Stargardter/Reuters
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/23/paraguay-pcc-brazilian-drug-cartel
‘The PCC are after me’: the drug cartel with Paraguay in its clutches | Paraguay | The Guardian
The PCC’s commanders are also thought to still call the shots from jail – and
allegedly coordinated the assassination of Paraguay’s leading criminal prosecutor
in May. Marcelo Pecci was shot dead on a Colombian beach while on his
honeymoon, just hours after his wife had posted on social media that they were
expecting their first child.
Four people who confessed to the crime were each sentenced to over 23 years in
prison on Friday. Colombia’s police chief indicated, however, that the PCC was
ultimately responsible, and had paid the hitmen $500,000 to eliminate Pecci, who
was investigating the cartel’s links in Paraguay.
The PCC also boasts some 30,000 foot soldiers in Brazil where it is waging
an increasingly bloody war for control of the remote Amazon region where Brazil
borders top cocaine producers Peru and Colombia – and where the British
journalist and Guardian contributor Dom Phillips and the Indigenous advocate
Bruno Pereira, disappeared this month.
Three suspects are in the custody of police, who say there is no sign of a broader
conspiracy, but local Indigenous activists insist that organised crime groups had a
hand in the killing.
The cartel is also expanding elsewhere in the continent, including Uruguay,
Argentina and Venezuela, has connections in the Caribbean, Europe and Africa,
and launders profits through banks in China and the US.
The PCC are “the most formidable organised crime group in South America”, said
Robert Muggah of the Igarapé Institute.
The cartel’s strength is based on its “legendary” level of control over its rank-and-
file – who swear an oath of loyalty and even pay membership fees. In Paraguay, it
“has extensively penetrated the state and co-opted the security establishment”,
explained Muggah.
“Brazil needs to pull back from its policy of mass incarceration” in order to
dismantle the PCC’s powerbase in Brazil’s overcrowded prisons, he argued. “The
only long-term solution is for Brazil to accelerate the decriminalisation of drugs.”
But such policies are as distant a prospect in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil as in
Paraguay, where the governing conservative Colorado party has itself been
regularly tied to narcotraffickers and organised crime.
Former president Horacio Cartes (2013-18) has repeatedly been accused of links to
a vast money-laundering operation linked to cigarette smuggling and drug
traffickers. Cartes, a powerful tobacco magnate, has denied any
wrongdoing, saying the allegations are politically motivated.
A historic Senad operation in February involving Pecci, the slain prosecutor,
seized ranches, apartments, luxury car garages and even an evangelical church
allegedly linked to drug money. But Paraguay’s interior minister conceded that the
criminal masterminds who had “permeated all levels of our society” remained at
large.
“Narcopolitics, the narcostate, are taking hold of Paraguay,” echoed Eulalio López,
a community leader in the poor northern region of San Pedro. “Society is totally
contaminated by it.”
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