Despite its Drug Lord Crackdown, the US Can’t Save Brazil | Opinion
The U.S. State Department recently designated Brazil’s two largest criminal organizations—the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV)—as terrorist organizations. The move is a consequential act and part of a broader effort to curb narcotrafficking across the Americas.
It raises compliance costs and legal exposure for Brazilian companies and it places the country’s financial system squarely within reach of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which can impose direct sanctions on banks and firms found to have facilitated transactions—knowingly or not—that benefit these groups’ commercial fronts.
In other words, Brazil’s fight against organized crime has entered a new punitive dimension, one with transnational teeth, and it has exposed just how far the Brazilian state has fallen short of enforcing the rule of law within its own borders.
The tragedy of crime is nothing new for Brazilians. It is now beyond dispute that narcotrafficking controls vast stretches of national territory. According to press reports, roughly 25 percent of Brazil’s population—between 50.6 and 61.6 million people—lives under the de facto authority of criminal factions, subject to the martial law of organized crime. The economic dimensions of this capture are staggering: In just the past three months, data from Brazil’s Financial Intelligence Unit (COAF) show that more than 44 billion reals—about $8.7 billion—flowed through suspicious transactions linked to criminal organizations in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone. These are not abstract figures. They are a measure of how far the state has been eclipsed by forces it can no longer contain.
Put plainly: Brazil collects taxes equivalent to nearly 40 percent of GDP, and still cannot deliver the most basic public goods—security, health care, education—to three-quarters of its population. The remaining quarter has effectively been ceded to narco-rule.
This is no longer a problem that can be softened by euphemism or wished away with good intentions. The Brazilian state has not simply become inefficient. It has lost governability altogether. Populism, contempt for the rule of law, and political irresponsibility have corroded the moral foundations of public authority, draining the legitimacy from which republican power draws its force. Brazil has become a democracy in which people vote but hold no real power—where rights exist on paper as poverty governs in practice, and where citizens dream of justice as injustice is delivered to their doorsteps. The Constitution today reads like the screenplay for a film that was never made.
Anyone living in Brazil knows that the citizens are exhausted—not by a crisis of democracy, but by the sheer ungovernability of the state itself. Elections are held, votes are cast, and yet those who are elected do not govern. This is no longer a matter of individual incompetence. The institutional machinery of the state has simply stopped functioning. The executive branch can no longer guarantee basic security, health care, or education. The legislature, awash in billions of reais in discretionary budget earmarks, churns out erratic laws disconnected from the lived reality. The judiciary, mired in procedural gridlock, can no longer meet the basic civic expectation of justice, with the Supreme Court itself now embroiled in troubling and embarrassing controversies of its own.
Inside the labyrinth of Brazil’s public administration, countless federal, state, and municipal agencies remain dominated by inefficient bureaucracies and anachronistic union politics—still enamored with rubber stamps, filing clerks, and paper-punching. There are, to be sure, exemplary civil servants who carry out their duties with rigor and competence. But they are trapped in a system of circular validations and redundant approvals that paralyze the flow of government work and undermine effective public administration. And whenever an innovative solution is proposed, an army of oversight bodies descends with threats of sanctions and pressure from every conceivable direction.
The Brazilian state is collapsing under its own weight—sluggish, unresponsive, bloated with structural excess. Year after year, the tax burden grows; year after year, public services shrink. Perhaps most alarming of all, legality itself has become a foreign concept across vast stretches of national territory. The gravity of the situation is now serious enough to draw the attention—and the initiative—of Washington, which has moved to contain the advance of narcotrafficking that Brazil’s own institutions have failed to stop.
Brazil’s political shipwreck is no accident. The fragility of the country’s institutional arrangement is directly tied to the absence of an organized economic elite genuinely committed to building a government oriented toward national prosperity. Brazil certainly has powerful individual capitalists. But a continental nation requires structured coordination—individual brilliance is not enough.
Progress, development, and social inclusion are the products of intelligent economic policy grounded in national reality, not abstract ideology. Prosperity, above all, is political work: ideas tethered to real life, generating tangible impact and social mobility for everyone willing to labor honestly and with dedication.
But how does one build a virtuous model of nationhood against a backdrop of festive corruption and unpunished criminality? How does one assert an ethical imperative in a country that makes the honest citizen feel like a fool? How does one sustain the people’s hope after so many successive political disappointments? Democracy, after all, was never a promise of ease. At its core, it is a possibility—a path through the regime of freedoms that must be sought, built, and renewed every single day.
The misgovernance Brazilians endure is not a permanent political sentence. But the changes the country needs will not come from external measures—however helpful those may be at the margins. Washington’s designation of the PCC and the Comando Vermelho as terrorist organizations may tighten the noose around narco-finance, and it may even concentrate minds in Brasília. But it does not reach the depth of Brazil’s internal political dysfunction, nor can it substitute for the hard work of rebuilding institutions from within. Beyond the reach of foreign influence, real change will come only through active, responsible civic engagement—a citizenry resolved to alter the course of events.
Sebastiao Ventura Pereira da Paixao Jr. is a lawyer and Chairman, Instituto Millenium, a Brazilian think tank.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.