US terror label shields favela massacres

The victims: trapped between gang rule and state violence

The 110,000 residents of Rio de Janeiro’s Complexo da Penha, Complexo do Alemão, and Vila Cruzeiro did not need the United States to tell them that Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital are violent organisations. They live under the guns of these criminal networks daily, paying protection taxes to survive, watching their children recruited as foot soldiers, navigating streets where the state has long since ceded territory.

On October 28, 2025, those same residents experienced what happens when the state decides to reclaim those territories militarily. A police raid involving 2,500 officers targeted Comando Vermelho in these very favelas and killed at least 121 people in 15 hours. Bodies were laid in rows on the ground, covered with blankets in a Vila Cruzeiro square. The operation was the deadliest police raid in Brazilian history.

An AtlasIntel survey conducted days later found 88% of favela residents viewed the raid positively. This is not a contradiction. It reflects the unbearable arithmetic of life under criminal governance where police violence, however catastrophic, is perceived as the only available response to gang rule. It also reflects the absence of any other state presence: no schools, no clinics, no economic alternatives, just the gun and the badge and the drug trafficker.

The US terrorist designation announced on May 28, 2026, does not offer these communities an alternative. It argues instead that the solution to gang violence is more of the same, securitisation, financial strangulation, and the legal architecture that justifies precisely the kind of operation that killed 121 people in October.

The political weapon: delivering for Flavio Bolsonaro

The timing is not coincidental. The designation came two days after right-wing presidential candidate Senator Flavio Bolsonaro met Donald Trump at the White House on May 27, 2026, and explicitly lobbied him to designate the two gangs as terrorist organisations. According to reporting from Brazil’s major newspapers, Trump told aides after the meeting: “We have to help these guys.”

Flavio Bolsonaro is running neck-and-neck with incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in polls ahead of October’s presidential election. Public safety is the central wedge issue in that race. The terrorist designation, a gift from the most powerful government in the hemisphere, delivered on a silver platter, is a campaign weapon dressed in the language of national security.

After the designation was announced, Flavio Bolsonaro told reporters that Lula “was on his knees to Trump to lobby for CV and PCC, and I was there to work so they can be treated as terrorists.” The assertion is both brazen and revealing. The son of a former president sentenced to 27 years for attempting to subvert democracy is positioning himself as the partner of the US government in a foreign election.

Trump has already demonstrated where his political loyalties lie. In 2025, he raised tariffs on Brazil to nearly 50% in solidarity with Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio’s father, after the elder Bolsonaro was sentenced for his attempt to overturn the 2022 election result. The current president of Brazil, Lula, spent three hours with Trump earlier in May 2026 urging him not to proceed with the designation. He was ignored.

The Donroe Doctrine: empire dressed in counter-narcotics

The designation is the latest manifestation of what the Trump administration calls the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reboot of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, reframed as the “Trump Corollary” in the National Security Strategy. The original Monroe Doctrine declared the Americas off-limits to European colonisation. The Donroe Doctrine declares Latin America the exclusive sphere of US influence, to be managed through tariffs, sanctions, and military intervention.

We have seen this before. On January 3, 2026, US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an act of extraordinary international lawlessness, justified under the Donroe Doctrine as a response to drug trafficking and authoritarian governance. The doctrine has been deployed to threaten interventions in Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Panama.

Now it has arrived in Brazil. The terrorist designation gives the US legal and financial tools to punish businesses and banks with any connection to PCC or CV. It simultaneously provides political cover for the kind of aggressive police operations that killed 121 people in October, operations that are already happening with US-trained forces, US-provided equipment, and now US legal blessing.

Celso Amorim, Lula’s foreign affairs adviser and former foreign minister, put it plainly: “Organized crime is an evil that must be fought. International cooperation is welcome, especially in matters of money laundering and arms trade. But pretext for intervention is unacceptable.”

The pretext is the point. By framing Brazilian criminal organisations as “terrorists,” the US transforms a domestic law enforcement problem into a national security threat, and creates the legal and political space to intervene when it chooses.

The alternative that was dismissed

In March 2026, Lula launched a $2bn initiative targeting the financial underpinnings of criminal networks: disrupting arms trafficking, improving the prison system, investing in homicide investigations. It is a comprehensive approach that recognises what sociologist Luis Flavio Sapori of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais has argued: “Armed confrontation with young drug traffickers from the outskirts is ineffective and fails to deal with the complexity of money laundering and its links to financial crime.”

This programme did not require the terrorist label. It was working, slowly, on the structural causes that produce gang violence: economic marginalisation, state abandonment, a prison system that functions as a recruitment centre for criminal networks. It recognised that the residents of the favelas are not the enemy. They are the victims.

The US designation dismisses this approach. It treats the symptoms, not the disease. And by embedding itself in a Brazilian electoral contest, it makes clear that the objective is not public safety in Rio’s favelas. It is political advantage in Washington and Brasília.

The counter-argument we cannot ignore

This analysis would be incomplete without acknowledging the genuine violence of PCC and Comando Vermelho. These are not political dissidents or resistance movements. They are organisations responsible for drug trafficking across continents, territorial control through murder and extortion, and the governance of roughly 1,500 favelas where the state has no presence. The 121 dead in October include gang members killed in conflict with police, alongside residents caught in the crossfire.

There is a real debate to be had about whether favela residents, living under criminal rule, see aggressive police action as their best available option, and the 88% approval figure for the October raid cannot be easily dismissed. Lula’s own government has struggled to contain gang violence, and the $2bn programme, while promising, has not produced visible results fast enough to prevent the political space from being captured by Flavio Bolsonaro and his US allies.

But the existence of genuine criminal violence does not justify the political weaponisation of the terrorist label. It does not render the residents of Complexo da Penha collateral damage in a US election operation. And it does not obscure the fundamental irony at the centre of this story: the United States is designating Brazilian criminal organisations as terrorists while arming and politically supporting the son of a former Brazilian president who was sentenced to 27 years for attempting to subvert democracy, a crime that mirrors Trump’s own January 6-related legal exposure.

The people of Rio’s favelas do not need the United States to tell them what violence looks like. They experience it daily, from the gang members who tax them and the police who raid them. What they need, and what the terrorist designation actively prevents, is a sovereign Brazilian response built on investment, inclusion, and the recognition that they are citizens, not battleground terrain in someone else’s geopolitical game.