ABSTRACT
Brazil has battled entrenched criminal organisations for decades, with the country’s prison system facilitating the growth of such organisations and serving as their operational headquarters. Intense criminal contestation, combined with profit-seeking motives, have driven the rapid internationalisation of Brazil’s main criminal groups. The PCC, for instance, operates on at least three continents and has forged working relationships and alliances with other major international organisations, such as the Italian ‘Ndrangheta and Serbian and Albanian criminal groups. Another significant trend observed during the reporting period was the convergence of traditional drug-trafficking activities and environmental crime. Categorised as ‘narcoecology’, this criminal convergence unites ‘[drug] trafficking with the illegal logging market, with land grabbing and with mining on indigenous lands, especially in Roraima State’.
