The dictatorship created its own executioner. It just took fifty years to realize it.

On Ilha Grande, a humid speck off Rio’s coast, Brazil once dumped everyone it wanted to forget: the diseased, the poor, the disobedient. The prison they built there — Instituto Penal Cândido Mendes — was nicknamed Caldeirão do Inferno, Hell’s Cauldron. And like all good metaphors, it was accurate. What the military junta didn’t expect was that hell would organize itself, walk out the gates, and take over half the country.

This is the story of the Comando Vermelho — the Red Command — and how a logistical mistake during Brazil’s dictatorship became the blueprint for a parallel state that governs more territory than most mayors.

The classroom with steel bars

In the 1970s, Brazil’s military regime had a problem: too many people who refused to shut up. Students, militants, urban guerrillas — anyone who even whispered the word socialism vanished into the system. The generals needed somewhere to put them.

So they made a decision that would haunt Brazil for half a century: they threw the revolutionaries in with the robbers.

Inside Cândido Mendes, political prisoners — trained in Marxist theory, schooled in clandestine organization — ended up sharing cells with kidnappers, armed thieves, and hustlers who knew how to move weight and muscle. It was like accidentally creating an MBA program for organized crime.

The leftists taught structure. They set up collective food pools, libraries, improvised health clinics. They showed their cellmates how to communicate under censorship, how to build solidarity, how to think in terms of power and resistance. The criminals taught logistics: loyalty, discipline, and how to turn scarcity into profit.

Out of this hybrid education came the Falange Vermelha — the Red Phalanx — later renamed Comando Vermelho. Inmates called each other companheiros (comrades) and scrawled the walls with revolutionary slogans: Paz, Justiça e Liberdade — Peace, Justice, and Freedom. They meant it, at first. What they didn’t know was that their experiment in prison solidarity would outlive every ideology that birthed it — and mutate into something far more durable than any political movement: a business.

When democracy inherited a monster

By the time Brazil’s dictatorship collapsed in 1985, the Comando Vermelho had already established its DNA: organized, ideological (at least in branding), and rooted in mutual aid that genuinely resonated with people the state had abandoned.

The new democracy inherited a broken country — police forces brutalized and corrupted by military rule, favelas that had never seen a functioning school or hospital, and a network of highly organized ex-prisoners fluent in both political rhetoric and street economics.

Then cocaine arrived.

The 1980s drug boom gave CV capital. Rio’s favelas — sprawling, dense, and ignored by every level of government — gave them territory. While politicians debated neoliberal reforms in Brasília, the Red Command became the shadow government of the periphery. They collected taxes (they called it protection). They enforced rules (brutal, yes, but faster than waiting six years for a court date). They provided justice that felt immediate — and in many places, more predictable — than anything wearing a badge.

For a while, CV still wore revolutionary colors. They cast themselves as Robin Hoods: stealing from the rich, defending the poor, standing up to corrupt cops. Some of that was true. Most was marketing. But in neighborhoods where the state’s only presence came through raids and neglect, even marketing mattered.

The bastard in the mirror

Here’s what the official story won’t tell you: the Comando Vermelho has never been external to the Brazilian state. It’s the state’s bastard reflection — the twin it refuses to acknowledge at family reunions.

The same military logic that tortured students in the 1970s now drives the “war on drugs.” The same vocabulary of cleansing and pacification. The same casual expendability of poor bodies. Governors build careers on televised raids. Police commanders pose with seized rifles like trophy hunters. And behind the scenes, everyone’s cutting deals.

Corrupt officers rent out guns, tip off favelas before “operations,” and ensure the right people vanish so the right photos can be staged. Politicians collect campaign donations through intermediaries with creative job titles. In 2002, leaked recordings caught Rio city-council candidates literally meeting with CV leaders to guarantee “votes from the hill.” The scandal was enormous. Nothing changed.

By 2006, journalist Luiz Eduardo Soares — a former national-security official — had documented the systematic collaboration between police and traffickers in Elite da Tropa, later adapted into the blockbuster Tropa de Elite. Everyone saw it. The system stayed.

In 2018, militia boss Adriano da Nóbrega — a decorated ex-cop — was tied to the family of then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro through his son Flávio, who had employed Adriano’s mother and ex-wife in his office. Adriano was later killed in a shootout that conveniently prevented testimony. The investigation evaporated.

This isn’t corruption. Corruption implies the system is broken. This is the system.

The “war on crime” isn’t a war. It’s a business plan wearing a tragedy mask.

Jesus enters the trap

By the 2000s, CV’s revolutionary mythology was crumbling. The Robin Hood narrative doesn’t hold when you’re kneecapping debtors. Favelas needed something else — something neither the state nor the traffickers could monopolize: forgiveness.

Enter the Evangelicals.

Pentecostal and neo-charismatic churches swept through the peripheries like a flood, building temples where police wouldn’t patrol. They offered redemption, structure, and a sense of belonging — and crucially, a way out. Former traffickers became pastors. Pastors became negotiators. Some gained enough clout to mediate truces between rival factions. Others baptized drug bosses on Instagram Live, rebranding bloodshed as “testimony.”

Pastor Marcos Pereira, of Assembleia de Deus Vitória em Cristo, has officiated conversions for at least a dozen known CV members since 2019. His sermons rack up millions of views. He’s never been investigated. His office sent me a statement: “Christ welcomes all sinners.” Sure. But Christ also didn’t usually accept tithes in cocaine-scented cash.

For CV, the evangelical boom was divine marketing. Publicly, leaders “renounced crime for Christ.” Privately, they used church networks for legitimacy and control. It wasn’t about faith. It was about infrastructure.

The same bocas de fumo (drug points) that once blasted funk now play gospel between gunfights. Kids wear shirts reading Jesus é o Dono do Morro — Jesus Owns the Hill. Meanwhile, the same evangelical bloc dominates Congress, controls municipal councils, and crafts moral laws against “immorality” and “marginals” — justifying police violence while ignoring its financiers.

The Comando Vermelho doesn’t need to infiltrate politics anymore. It lives inside it, draped in a cross.

October’s ritual sacrifice

On October 24, 2025, Rio’s military police launched a “mega-operation” in the Complexos do Alemão and Penha — two sprawling favela networks in the North Zone. By the time the smoke cleared, at least 121 people were dead. Officials called it “neutralizing narcoterrorism.” Residents called it a massacre.

The government’s version: elite units responding to intelligence about a planned CV offensive. The reality: armored vehicles crushing alleys, helicopters strafing rooftops, automatic fire through living rooms. When human-rights monitors arrived, they found bullet holes in schools, clinics, bedrooms.

Police paraded seized rifles and drugs for TV cameras while families waited outside morgues. Within hours, evangelical influencers and allied politicians flooded social media with praise for the “divine justice” delivered to “criminals.” Governor Cláudio Castro announced a “Consórcio da Paz” — a Peace Consortium uniting state, municipal, and religious leaders to “coordinate future security strategies.” Translation: a PR platform for the next raid.

But these operations never work. CV didn’t collapse. Within seventy-two hours, new commanders filled the void. The same pastors who prayed for peace officiated funerals — including those of children and bystanders killed in “collateral” fire.

These raids don’t produce security. They produce choreography: death for the poor, visibility for the powerful, headlines for re-election. And through it all, the Red Command evolves, surviving every government that claims to destroy it.

The mirror still standing

Fifty years after its birth in a dictatorship’s island prison, the Comando Vermelho has become the perfect reflection of Brazil’s contradictions: product and pretext, born from repression, matured in abandonment, sustained by moral hypocrisy.

When politicians bless raids in the morning and their bagmen negotiate with traffickers at night, the problem isn’t crime. It’s complicity.

Every rifle seized in a favela has a legal twin owned by a rancher, militia member, or senator’s bodyguard. Every “redeemed” trafficker preaching gospel online mirrors a deputy laundering faith into votes. Every “security policy” execution repeats the dictatorship’s core logic: the poor are expendable, and their deaths are performance art for power.

The Comando Vermelho didn’t invent Brazil’s violence. It institutionalized it. It learned the state’s language and discovered what every successful criminal organization eventually learns:

The best way to survive isn’t to fight the system.
It’s to become it.