Drug trafficking expands and increases its power in the Amazon silently, supported by a state vacuum, porous borders, and violence. How to combat their criminal empire will be one of the central axes of the Amazon Summit to be held on Tuesday and Wednesday in Brazil.
The largest tropical jungle on the planet has become a “strategic region” for the transit of drugs from producer countries, such as Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, to consumers, including Brazil itself.
According to data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum, around 40% of the cocaine trafficked in the South American country passes through the Amazon, where the presence of criminal gangs to control the routes has been growing in the last decade.
The matter is of great concern to the eight Amazonian countries, which will meet in the city of Belém, capital of the state of Pará, to discuss the future of the biome and one of the issues that will be addressed in the final declaration is organized crime, according to official sources.
“New threats, especially those related to organized crime, are very present and terrifying. We have to address this issue together,” said the Secretary of Climate, Energy and Environment of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, André Corrêa do Lago, at a conference pre-summit press release.
Drug traffickers have used the thick of the jungle since the 1980s, but in recent years they have modernized their methods.
They operate from inside and outside prisons, have a hierarchy typical of an Army and have added new practices to their criminal catalogue: from mining to land occupation or hardwood trade.
The result is an amalgamation of acronyms that are increasingly present in the region. The list is extensive: First Capital Command (PCC), Vermelho Command (CV), Aragua Train, Class A Command (CCA), Los Cachorros (‘Os Crias’), Bonde dos 13 (B13), Família do Norte (FDN), Criminal Union of Amapá (UCA), Bonde dos 40 (B40)… And there is more.
“The groups arrive silently and when the authorities want to find out, they are organized, they begin to paint the walls with their symbol and impose their law,” Aiala Colares, a researcher at the State University of Pará (UEPA), explained to EFE.
Colares has coordinated a recent study on the dynamics of violence in the Amazon, a two-year job based on data analysis, police reports and interviews that paints a bleak picture.
This investigation indicates that around 40 towns in Pará, where the summit will be held, are dominated by criminal groups.
And these groups also shape their networks based on the economic strength of each municipality, that is, where they see there is business, they get involved. Example, the exploitation of gold, cassiterite and manganese.
“In Jacareacanga, the Comando Vermelho is trading drugs within the mining areas,” illegally opened in the middle of the jungle, “because it is more advantageous to trade drugs for gold than for money,” says Colares.
In addition, traffickers -he continues- use the structure of illegal mining, which sometimes includes rudimentary airstrips, to move the drug.
Faced with this, local communities have two options: look the other way or denounce and face the consequences, and that is where environmentalists come into their sights.
In Peru, like other Amazon countries, environmental defenders are threatened by the presence of these illegal activities, such as timber trafficking, illegal mining or drug trafficking.
An infinity of dangers to which is added, in addition to the indifference and lack of awareness of the population, what the organizations denounce as “criminalization processes.”
“Our territories are being invaded without mercy. They (the criminals) are not afraid, every day we are more stripped of our territories,” the president of the Kakataibo Native Communities Federation (Fenakoca), Herlin Odicio, said in a recent interview with EFE. , who warned that it is not a local fight, but “from the whole world” to continue breathing “pure air.”
During the pandemic, control work decreased. Organized crime then took advantage of the opportunity to occupy indigenous territories and natural areas of the country whose Amazonian surface covers 60% of its entirety.
The last public case was that of the well-known Asháninka indigenous leader Santiago Contoricón, who was murdered in April in his community, in the department of Junín, and according to police investigations, drug trafficking is behind the crime.
Colares is clear. The solution involves cooperation and solutions shared by the eight Amazon countries, although this requires “time, money and political will.”
