With their hands and feet bound, the two dead men who were recently found by police officers in the trunk of a Peugeot compact car seemed at first like many other victims on the streets of Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city.
However, as if signing their work, the executioners marked the bodies with a gruesome flourish. Using a knife, they carved three letters into the torsos: FDN, the initials of Familia do Norte (Family of the North), a drug gang battling for supremacy over the cocaine trade in the Brazilian Amazon.
With Brazil emerging as the world’s second-largest consumer of cocaine after the US, the Amazon is gaining importance as a smuggling domain. Traffickers ferry the drug across porous borders with Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, before moving the cocaine by riverboat to the Atlantic for shipment to Europe.
Illustration: Yusha
Adding to the mix, the torrid growth of Brazil’s rain forest cities sustains a booming market of its own for cocaine and substances like oxy — a cheap blend of cocaine paste, gasoline and kerosene — fueling a surge in drug violence as the Brazilian Amazon’s population approaches 25 million.
While distant Brazilian border outposts like Tabatinga absorb some of the bloodshed, Manaus, the Amazon’s premier transportation hub and largest metropolitan area, is reeling from the expansion of the cocaine trade, enduring turf wars between gangs, targeted killings of police officers and grisly murders involving the decapitation and dismemberment of victims.
“Parts of Manaus now resemble a conflict zone,” said George Gomes, a top counter-narcotics official in this sprawling, traffic-choked city of 2 million people.
“For every trafficker we capture, another takes his place,” he added. “Our adversaries have shown an impressive capacity to evolve and prosper.”
The metamorphosis of Manaus from a sleepy river outpost known for its tropical Belle Epoque architecture into an epicenter of the Amazon’s cocaine trade reflects broader shifts in the city over decades. To some residents, it has grown almost unrecognizable since the industrial expansion in the 1970s during Brazil’s military dictatorship, when many of the city’s older buildings were razed and migrants flocked here in search of factory jobs.
“Manaus was an idyllic place in my youth, a city where we would swim in creeks and see the Amazon’s wildlife up close in the trees of the plazas,” said Milton Hatoum, 62, a writer who grew up in Manaus and depicts the city in his works of fiction.
Hatoum, who now lives in Sao Paulo, said that he was shocked nearly every time he returned to Manaus.
“That Manaus was systemically destroyed, replaced with a city with slums so deadly that I fear to even set foot in them,” he said.
A striking feature of the drug trade in Manaus and other cities in Amazonas, the giant Brazilian state that is three times the size of California, involves the spreading reach of gangs. They often control cocaine trafficking from within prisons, replicating a sophisticated organized crime structure with roots in larger cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
In Manaus, Familia do Norte wields broad influence in the city’s favelas even though the gang’s top leaders have been imprisoned. They still exert their sway through a loosely organized web of operatives inside and outside penitentiaries because of lax prison oversight, according to security officials.
Opening a bloody new chapter in the Amazon’s cocaine trade, an even larger prison gang from southeast Brazil, First Capital Command, has expanded into Manaus. The gang oversaw a four-day uprising in Sao Paulo in 2006, during which almost 200 people were killed. Now it is battling with Familia do Norte in various parts of the city.
On the street level, dealers with allegiances to either group vie for control of bocas de fumo, or points of sale where drug deals are carried out, sometimes ending in execution-style killings in which operatives spray an area with gunfire.
The authorities also grapple with murders that settle scores between street dealers and cocaine users over drug-related debts, with Amazonas registering a homicide rate of 50.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012, up 157 percent since the start of the century and almost twice Brazil’s national rate.
Officials say they were able to reduce the homicide rate in Manaus last year, largely by expanding police patrols in poor areas. However, most murders in the city are still thought to be related to drugs as the prison gangs wield their clout, said Debora Mafra, an investigator with the Amazonas Civil Police.
Manaus is surrounded by rain forest and has only about a tenth of the population of the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Yet the fraying security adds to a dystopian feel in some areas, with luxurious new residential towers and a futuristic World Cup soccer stadium standing near canals reeking of sewage and squatter settlements fleeced of trees.
Reflecting the precarious living conditions across big stretches of the city, Manaus ranks last among Brazil’s 16 largest cities in the UN Human Development Index, a comprehensive measure of economic, life expectancy and other statistics.
In many corners of Manaus, users can buy oxy or crack for as little as US$2 a rock, and some consume their purchases openly in broad daylight, smoking the drugs in pipes made from aluminum cans. Whether belonging to drug gangs or operating on their own, dealers ply their trade in what amounts to a Hobbesian contest to meet demand.
“Getting drugs in Manaus is easy,” said Francisco Edinaldo da Silva Pereira, 34, an unemployed taxi driver and recovering addict.
“These days you go into a bar, start drinking and when you least expect it you find someone in that bar who sells,” he said. “It’s like that in every neighborhood.”
While drug violence afflicts Manaus and other cities, Brazil has opted to avoid large intervention strategies like the ones the US has pursued in neighboring cocaine-producing nations. Still, the Federal Police, Brazil’s lead agency for fighting drug trafficking, recently added at least 19 border installations to bolster anti-drug operations.
Brazilian agents have seized tonnes of cocaine and arrested major figures in the Amazon drug trade like Jair Ardela Michue, a Peruvian kingpin who assembled a sprawling operation for smuggling cocaine into Manaus.
However, institutions continue to come under the stress of the cocaine trade, like when counter-narcotics agents in Manaus arrested Karl Marx de Araujo Gomes, a police chief in a town in Amazonas, after finding him with 325kg of cocaine in his pickup truck while he proclaimed his innocence. He is one of several police officers recently charged with drug trafficking.
Security officials here insist they are making strides against traffickers.
In a show of force one morning last month, more than a dozen police officers from Fera, a special operations squad in Manaus, embarked on a sweep of Beco Cruzeiro do Sul, a slum where cocaine dealers are thought to operate.
Wielding assault rifles and hiding their faces behind balaclavas out of fear of retribution from drug gangs, the officers stormed into hovels. Amid the squalor of one home reeking of feces, the officers questioned residents about the whereabouts of a man suspected of being a dealer. He was gone, and the officers quietly filtered out of the slum.
“This isn’t surprising since the dealers have informers everywhere, even within our own ranks,” one officer said, requesting that he not be identified because he was not authorized to discuss police corruption with a reporter.
He was still clad in his balaclava as he gazed at the slum, assembled around one of the igarapes, or creeks, which somehow still flow through Manaus.
“Look at this place,” the Fera officer said. “This isn’t our territory, but theirs.”
Additional reporting by Nadia Sussman
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