Brazil rejects US request to designate two gangs as terrorist organizations

The Brazilian govt has rejected a request via the USA state division to designate two primary legal gangs as terrorist organizations, in keeping with Mario Sarrubo, Brazil’s nationwide secretary of public safety.

Sarrubo mentioned the request used to be made on Tuesday all over a gathering between US and Brazilian officers in Brasília.

The US officers had been involved concerning the gangs Primeiro Comando da Capital, referred to as PCC, and Comando Vermelho, referred to as CV, which keep watch over territories in different Brazilian towns and are believed to have participants in the USA.

Trump has been looking to tie his competitive crackdown on immigration to the presence of participants of Latin American legal gangs in US towns. Earlier this 12 months, the USA govt designated a number of crime factions as terrorist organizations, together with Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua and El Salvador’s MS-13, in addition to Mexican cartels and Haitian gangs.

“We don’t have terrorist organizations here, we have criminal organizations that have infiltrated society,” mentioned Sarrubo. But Brazilian legislation, he added, best considers organizations that violently conflict with the federal government for non secular or racial causes to be terrorists.

In contemporary weeks, the Trump management has deported loads of Latin American immigrants, alleging they had been gang participants, even though it offered little proof in their legal ties.

At the assembly in Brasília, US officers knowledgeable their Brazilian opposite numbers that their request used to be a part of an effort to handle immigration and legal gangs with a transnational presence, pronouncing they had been priorities for the Trump management, mentioned one supply who used to be provide.

US officers mentioned a terrorist designation may just lend a hand the federal government practice sanctions, carry assets and goal legal provide chains, the similar supply added.

According to this supply, US officers mentioned the FBI had reported that the PCC and the Comando Vermelho had cells in 12 US states, basically Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Connecticut and Tennessee.

Those reviews, the supply added, alleged that the gangs trafficked weapons and laundered cash via Brazilians who traveled to the USA, including that 113 other people had been denied visas to go into the rustic on account of connections to arranged crime in 2024 by myself.

On Monday, the place of business of Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the previous Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, mentioned he met with Trump Organization officers to ship a file that he mentioned integrated intelligence data that tied the PCC and the CV to terrorist acts.

The US embassy in Brasília didn’t instantly respond to a request for remark.