Prisons of the Amazon

Every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of women and children in the capital crowd into northbound buses, lumbering along BR-174, that strip of patchy highway that runs 2,234 miles straight to Venezuela. It’s a long, hot ride, past the Pioneer factory, the Whirlpool factory, the SC Johnson factory, the luxury golf resort, the landfill where cell phone signals flutter and the rumble of logging trucks scatters the vultures picking through the refuse before it gets buried.

Out here the concrete gives way to jungle. Military police run exercises on the margins of the road, firing live ammunition and tossing grenades into the trees. The women and children step off the bus at the intersection of the highway and the natural gas plant at the 8-kilometer marker. Even though they are only 20 kilometers north of the city, a heat wave like this can make a two-hour trip feel like a sweltering ride all the way to Caracas.

Joining the procession, the weary visitors carry packages up a gentle slope where three private prison facilities are nestled in the forest, one after the other on the left side of a single-lane penetration road, flanked by guard towers and concertina wire. First is the Instituto Penal Antônio Trindade (IPAT), which opened its gates in 2006 to alleviate overcrowding in the system. Originally built to house 736 inmates awaiting trial, ten years later the place holds 1,006 inmates in three blocks. Second is the Centro de Detenção Provisória Masculino (CDPM), erected in 2011 to handle overflow from IPAT. Built for 810 inmates, five years later it houses 1,383 pretrial detainees. The detainees here might be accused of anything from robbery to murder to missed alimony payments. Those convicted will move to the last unit on the road, tucked into the jungle more than a mile off the main highway, Complexo Penitenciário Anísio Jobim (COMPAJ), a former agricultural penal colony turned maximum-security prison where 1,821 inmates are kept in confined and semi-open spaces designed for 1,072. All told, the three units on this road, the largest in the Amazonas state prison system, are grinding along at 161 percent capacity. Their only relief in sight is a barren clearing near the main highway where São Paulo–based prison management company Umanizzare will eventually build a fourth unit to capture the overflow.

For Umanizzare each prisoner is like an annuity, adding to the income stream from their Amazon portfolio where the prison population has nearly doubled since 2010 in response to a crackdown on drug trafficking. Nationwide, only 3 percent of Brazil’s prisons are privately operated. In the Amazon, almost 40 percent are private enterprises, bolstered by the support of local, state, and federal politicians who accept the company’s campaign donations and parrot its talking points: these facilities are bastions of hope and rehabilitation, offering legal assistance, health clinics, selfimprovement classes, and arts and crafts to bandits who had never learned to respect their mothers or teachers.

When it comes to private security, you get what you pay for. At the primary gate a security team inspects everyone’s identification, noting place of origin and time of entry. Approved visitors proceed through a second gate and shuffle through a line to present themselves for a second time, fake IDs being one of the most basic disguises of prostitutes, messengers, and assassins. From there, visitors proceed through a third gate, where they are separated into two lines—one for men and one for women. Everyone gets an intimate pat-down, a close inspection of any packages, and a cursory wave of the metal detecting wand. Agents withhold any electronic de- vices and flip through the pages of any books or magazines. Then it’s through the fourth gate for taste tests and x-rays. All food and drink is placed on a plastic table for a trio of inspectors. Every bottle of Coke gets poured into two little cups, one for the visitor, one for the guard to make sure it’s not poison, liquor, or drugs. If there’s a child present, all the better. Offer the kid a taste and watch the mother’s eyes. Then visitors put their purses and bags on the conveyor belt for an x-ray gaze; nail files, razors, and executive pens glow electric blue on the monitor, begging to be seized before they end up in someone’s neck. If guards want to use metal knives and forks during meal breaks, they have to bring their own set of cutlery from home and keep them in little pouches in a secure locker area near the staff dining hall. Not a single scrap of metal makes it past security—at least not unless it’s been paid for.

This wouldn’t be a prison without contraband. The guards catch everything except what they aren’t supposed to catch. A rock of cocaine swimming in a Coke bottle. A cake with pineapple frosting, nineteen candles, and a blade. Clamshell phones tucked between a child’s legs, allowing cartel lieutenants to connect with their men as easily as they would from a stronghold in the city. Prison officials will tell you these oversights are simple human error. What they mean is that, now and then, someone might look the other way. A new vendor might deliver a cart of laundry or a bag of beans or rice or beef. It takes a lot of deliveries to cook 3,000 meals a day plus special turkey dinners for Christmas. It takes a lot of female guards to search so many female visitors, and what kind of woman wants to work in a place like this? Even the honest ones might not want to search as deep as you might need to search or touch a child where she should never be touched. Even in an ideal world of fully staffed and funded prisons, the cartels will always be better staffed and better funded, engineering new ways to get what they need inside. Mold cocaine into a baby doll. Fly a pistol over the fence with a drone. Inovação, meu mano.

These days it’s harder than ever to keep order inside. Prisoners are stacked like sardines, mattresses strewn across the floor of every cell block, each one a hiding place. If guards have to focus on one threat, they focus on the cell phones, nerve centers for death and deals across the city. The men might not have enough beer inside these concrete walls, but they have an abundance of time. Time to dwell on broken promises, to stoke old rivalries and dream up new ones, to hatch plots and avenge the betrayals of another man in a similar cell up the road—or on a corner on the outside. Time to wait until just the right time, to place a phone call, to arrange the threats, amnesties, and payoffs necessary to unleash blood fury right under the nose of the warden. Dial up your man, pass the phone like a hot potato. If a guard sees something, tell him you see something, too: his mother soaking beans in the kitchen, his wife painting her nails, his daughter walking home from school.

The chirping forest beyond the fences belies the turmoil inside the units. In the dank cells of COMPAJ in 2002, Gelson Carnaúba, the drug boss known as “G” who controlled traffic in the southern zone of Manaus, orchestrated a rebellion to avenge the death of a fellow inmate who had been beaten and tortured by guards. Armed with a revolver, knives, and hammers, G and his men killed twelve inmates and a prison guard during a twelve-hour skirmish, the catalyst for a chain reaction of riots and escapes on the prison road that continues to this day.4 On visitation weekends, those riots feel like a false memory. In the main yard of IPAT, a few prisoners punt around soccer balls, scanning the line of new arrivals for familiar faces. Vendors in the parking lot huddle under the shade of canvas tents, coolers sloshing with half-melted ice. They sell energy drinks, water, and chips to the thirsty pilgrims whose arms ache with offerings: small televisions, newborn babies, plastic containers of freshly made pastries.

After an hour or more of security procedures, the visitors get a few minutes of time. There are those who know their loved ones are not innocent, but don’t they all believe their loved ones can be redeemed? Why else bring homemade cookies, fragrant soap, school art projects? The men whisper with their families, play solemn dominoes with their sons, watch TV in their cells when there is nothing left to say. Some prisoners have been waiting more than six months for their sentencing. Depending on the crimes and the ruling, they may ultimately just move down the road, making new friends and new enemies along the way, deeper into the forest, a longer walk for their loved ones until one day not a soul will make the trek anymore and the only solace left will be prayers.

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The riot at COMPAJ landed G in a federal prison in the south of Brazil, cut off from the river that fed his empire, from his lieutenants and foot soldiers, from the crooked authorities who looked the other way while he expanded his operation from within the walls of a lax state prison. In 2006, G crossed paths with a longtime rival who’d also been shipped to the federal pen, José Roberto Fernandes Barbosa, known as “Zé Roberto da Compensa,” the boss who controlled traffic in the western zone of Manaus. Now the sworn enemies were locked up alongside leaders from Brazil’s oldest and most organized criminal operations—Comando Vermelho (CV) of Rio de Janeiro and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) of São Paulo—both eager to build bridges in the north.

Organized crime has festered in Brazil’s prisons since the years of the military dictatorship, when everyday smugglers and thugs were imprisoned alongside dissident artists and academics. Between torture sessions at the hands of the guards, the prisoners exchanged lessons. The criminals learned the importance of organization, strategy, and alliances. The guerrillas learned how to harvest the enormous profits to be found in the narcotics and firearms trade. One man’s bank robbery was another man’s expropriation. Destabilizing the military regime served both sides. By the turn of the century, even as Brazil grew into a young democracy, its prisons remained cradles of organized crime, cities within cities where criminal leaders recruited new talent, directed traffic, and ordered murder, torture, and extortion inside and beyond the walls. On the outside, they were enabled by local politicians eager to keep violent crime confined to the penitentiaries and poor neighborhoods—and to grab their share of power, profit, and influence.

When it came to operating a sophisticated international syndicate, G and Zé Roberto had some catching up to do. The factions in the south of Brazil had diversified their businesses over the years, creating new markets beyond drugs and guns. In the most disenfranchised neighborhoods, PCC and CV could provide residents with basic utilities, cable TV and broadband internet, loans, protection from police intimidation—and jobs on the corner. At a time when President Lula’s policies were enriching the elites and elevating millions to the middle class, the largest “gangs” were creating a second state for those still left on the bottom. They could even influence the real state by guaranteeing votes from their people.

Up north, G and Zé Roberto had been embroiled in petty local turf wars, trading bullets with rivals and cops across town. Now leaders of CV and PCC—themselves rivals who had forged a tenuous alliance—took the young bosses from the Amazon under their wings. Look at the big picture, cara.

G and Zé Roberto were quick studies. For all their differences, they had one thing in common: northern pride. PCC and CV had built their nationwide networks by absorbing local and regional crime families, making them offers they could not refuse. Now after years of bloody competition, the two biggest gangs in Manaus had reached a fork in the road: remain at war over the river or form an alliance that could rival PCC and CV.

And so it was that in a federal prison cell a thousand miles from their home territory, the Familia do Norte (FDN) was born, its creed etched in a handwritten statute that would soon govern who suffered and who thrived in the Amazon.

From the union of the children of this land is born the “Family of the North,” whose purpose is to seek peace, justice, and freedom for all those who dream of the equality of men. And from the synthesis of our ideas it is agreed that all members of this family are subject to the rules and guidelines of this statute and of the directives that emanate from our council.

Article 1: We are all equal without distinction of any kind and our freedom of conscience and belief is inviolable. We ensure that everyone has the right to peace, justice, and freedom.

Article  2:  Our struggle is against the oppressors and those who disrespect the rights and dignity of human beings. Injustices, encroachments, rapes, email or inequalities of any nature inside and outside prisons shall not be permitted.

Article 3: Among our brotherhood, respect for loyalty, fraternity, and transparency will prevail, and it will be the duty of all to respect order and hierarchy in the family.

Article 4: The family members of the union will be protected and respected. And the family of one will be the family of all.

For many of Brazil’s elites, the revolutionary rhetoric of factions like the Familia do Norte is merely propaganda disguising a ruthless crime syndicate. In the neighborhoods where those factions operate, many residents believe Brazil’s elites are the real enemy. No matter whether you consider them gangs or militias, the Familia do Norte is the rabid underdog in the South American drug wars, armed by the communist rebels that lord over Colombia’s cocoa fields.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, while cocaine use in North America dropped, the use of cocaine in Brazil nearly doubled. The country grew into the world’s second largest market for the drug, flooding the Amazon River with narco traffic. By consolidating resources, G and Zé Roberto established a near monopoly on one of the most coveted smuggling corridors in the world: the Solimões River from Tabatinga to Manaus, a key waterway for cocaine manufactured in Brazil’s neighboring countries.

The FDN knows the Amazon the way a spider knows its web. By night, while riverboats and freighters chug up the Rio Solimões toward the Colombian border, they cross paths with clandestine traffic headed downriver, destined for Brazil’s capital cities or the wide-open Atlantic, where their cargo can be offloaded for the discotheques and boardrooms of Portugal. Along the way, smugglers skirt past military checkpoints and navy patrol boats using miniature submarines or riverine bypasses that only appear for a week or two during the wet season. Others cross by small aircraft, taking off from impromptu airstrips hacked into the Peruvian and Colombian jungle, flying low over the canopy, landing and unloading without making a blip on Brazil’s border radar. Just as many tons cross the old-fashioned way—right under the noses of federal officers—hidden in bushels of fruit or the bellies of livestock, disguised as consumer staples like shampoo and children’s toys, or molded carefully into the hulls or motors of their boats. If anything draws the suspicion of the authorities, the smugglers soldier on by bribe or by force, unafraid to empty the clips of their assault rifles on federal police or pirates from rival groups.

It takes a family to bring product a thousand miles downriver and into the right hands. Boat captains willing to bend regulations. Merchant marines willing to toss bodies overboard. Porters who know which crates to deliver to which stalls at the market in Manaus. Thousands of brothers and sisters, each with a price: checkpoint agents, missionaries, poachers, financial analysts, traveling shoe salesmen.

It takes a family to keep everyone safe on the river, in the streets, throughout the cell blocks. In the Amazonas state prison system, every inmate undergoes triage upon arrival: medical, psychological, and legal. Officials ask them to reveal their gang affiliation so they can be placed in a friendly cell block, which makes life easier for everyone. Sometimes new inmates lie to get closer to their enemies, but inmates will finger an imposter on sight if they don’t kill him first. When new detainees get to their cell block, they undergo a second interview with an FDN “sheriff” and with Rafael, the FDN’s IT guy, who enters key information into a laptop: name, neighborhood, family members, crimes committed. If the new inmate isn’t already working for a boss in his neighborhood, he will be assigned one, along with a password. They will wait six months to a year for a trial, lifting weights, getting tattoos, and boosting their boss’s team in the prison soccer league. They eat, shit, and breathe the doctrine of the FDN along the way, enjoying drugs, girls, and cell block parties as rewards for their loyalty. Upon release, they use that password to log the purchase and sale of cocaine, crack, and marijuana, leaving a portion of the profits in a neighborhood box on the tenth of every month.8 By 2015, the FDN was collecting more than R$100,000—roughly $30,000—from boxes in Manaus each month with the goal of raising the rake to a million. Rafael already had more than 10,000 names in a computer registry, pinging his BlackBerry with notifications—details about family members and rivals—updated daily from the COMPAJ cell that served as the FDN’s central command center.

It takes a family to spread goodwill and cheer. FDN profits financed legal assistance for family members in state and federal prisons, financial assistance for families who lost their sons in shootouts with the PCC bastards encroaching on their neighbor- hoods. Profits went toward improving the conditions inside the prison, smuggling in TVs, snacks, beer, and drugs to keep the brotherhood happy on the inside. Profits financed uniforms for the prison soccer league, team names corresponding to the teams of young men assigned to the FDN lieutenants, including a rising young enforcer, João Pinto Carioca, known more commonly as “João Branco,” patron of the squad “Potência Máxima”—Maximum Power—a force on the jail yard field and in the streets of the capital.

Soon there was enough money flowing that Zé Roberto could sponsor a legitimate team on the outside, Compensão, the pride of his old neighborhood. In just one season, Zé spent R$320,000 to boost his team to the local championship, where they competed in front of fans who waved banners that celebrated their FDN patrons like folk heroes.

—Featured Image by Vitor Souza / SECOM, via Fotos Públicas

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Excerpted from The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon, by Chris Feliciano Arnold, published by Picador. Copyright © 2018 by Chris Feliciano Arnold.