Brazil's Holy War Is Run by Cops Who Deal Drugs

Rio de Janeiro's far-right death squad economy isn't a bug — it's the entire operating system.

Meet the Cops Who Became the Cartel

While Bolsonaro and his crew spent years ranting about Comando Vermelho drug dealers, they were quietly building an empire with milícias — criminal gangs staffed by off-duty cops, prison guards, and ex-military. These guys do everything the traffickers do: extortion, drug sales, territorial control, murder. They just do it in uniform.

What started in the '90s as neighborhood "self-defense" groups has metastasized into Rio's actual dominant crime syndicate. According to researchers at UFRJ and UFF, militias now control more territory than the drug gangs — massive chunks of the West Zone and Baixada Fluminense, where millions of people live under their armed taxation system.

It's mob rule with a badge and a pension plan.

The Bolsonaro Family Album

When city councilwoman Marielle Franco got assassinated in 2018, the investigation ripped open the whole scam. Turns out the guys accused of killing her lived in Bolsonaro's gated community. There were literal family photos with militia bosses. Campaign finance records showed right-wing candidates using militia turf as their electoral base, where "voter outreach" means showing up with guns.

Rio's current governor, Cláudio Castro — an evangelical Bolsonaro clone —runs the most militarized state government in Brazil. His signature move? Mega-raids into favelas that leave dozens dead. Jacarezinho in 2021: 28 bodies. Complexo da Penha earlier this year: 22 more. All in trafficker zones. The militia neighborhoods? Crickets.

The pattern is clear: the state massacres its competition and protects its partners.

Take Adriano da Nóbrega, a former elite BOPE cop who became a militia kingpin while maintaining ties to Bolsonaro's sons. When police finally killed him in 2020, nobody could tell where the law enforcement ended and the organized crime began. Because there was no line.

Gangsters for Jesus

Now here's where it gets weird. Evangelical churches have basically colonized Brazil's prisons and favelas, creating this bizarre narco-Pentecostal hybrid.

Inside prisons, gang members convert to evangelicalism in droves — not because they found God, but because joining an evangelical crew means protection from rivals and guards. Pastors become the middlemen between criminals and politicians, trading votes for impunity. Churches collect tithes from blood money.

There's a favela that militias literally renamed "Complexo de Israel." They enforce church attendance at gunpoint. They've banned Afro-Brazilian religious practices. They police what women wear. It's a theocratic test lab in the middle of Rio.

And because evangelicals are now a third of Brazil's voters, this death cult has serious political juice. The same churches that preach against drugs depend entirely on drug money to expand. It's not even hypocritical anymore— it's just the business model.

The Real Bosses You Never See

Above all this street-level mayhem sits the actual power structure: real estate developers, businessmen, and politicians who launder everyone's money.

Meet Eduardo Bazzana: a 68-year-old "respectable" businessman from São Paulo, president of a shooting club with 7,000 members, owner of two registered gun shops. His defense team called him "an honored father of three and grandfather of two" whose only crime was "paying his taxes."

Turns out Bazzana was making R$40,000 per day — R$1.6 million over 40 days—selling ammunition directly to Comando Vermelho's top brass. Police found receipts in a CV leader's phone showing purchases of 44,000 cartridges and 14 assault rifles, including a .50 caliber weapon capable of shooting down aircraft. He used his sporting goods companies as fronts, with Pix payments traced directly to his personal and business accounts.

This happened after Bolsonaro loosened gun laws, when CAC registrations (hunters, shooters, collectors) exploded by over 400%. Legal gun clubs became the arms pipeline for the cartels. The shooting ranges where upstanding citizens practice their Second Amendment fantasies are literally the supply chain for gang wars.

Militias work the other end: clearing favelas, forging land titles, flipping property through fake co-ops. That money flows up into campaigns, megachurch construction, state contracts. Your "good Christians" and "anti-communist entrepreneurs" get rich off the body count.

The war on drugs is just cover. It's a smoke machine hiding how the system runs on what it claims to fight.

The Murder Economy

Here's the sick genius of it: Brazil's "security crisis" is a feature. Every massacre justifies bigger police budgets, new surveillance tech, military weapons contracts. Cops get bonuses based on kill counts. Private security companies, gun dealers, and evangelical media networks are all cashing in.

Activist Vini Almeida nailed it:

"The war on drugs in Brazil is not a policy —it's a business plan disguised as policy."

As long as poor Black people keep dying, everyone up the chain keeps eating.

Death as Governance

This is what philosopher Achille Mbembe called "necropolitics" — running society by controlling who gets to live and who has to die. From the pulpit to the prison yard, from the governor's mansion to the favela alleyway, it's all the same game: control poor bodies, profit from their fear, wrap it in Jesus talk.

The families still fighting for justice after Marielle's murder get it. The community journalists documenting every killing get it. They understand that the violence isn't a failure of the system — it's what makes the system work.

In Brazil's holy war, the gangsters wear crosses, the cops are the cartel, and the body count is the quarterly earnings report. The blood isn't a side effect. It's the product.