Brazil’s ultra-violent gangs expand to French Guiana

Brazilian ultra-violent criminal gangs are rapidly expanding their activity in French Guiana, recruiting members among youths in slums and in prisons.

“They told him to kill a guy, and without knowing who he was, he approached him with a shotgun and killed him like a dog, in a hammock,” recounts the prosecutor of Cayenne, the capital of this French overseas department, in profiling a young man arrested.

The boy was born in a camp of illegal gold prospectors. His mother was a prostitute, and “at the age of 20, he was a murderer,” says the prosecutor, Joel Sollier.

French gendarmes make a patrol one night in October in one of these shantytowns, known as Buraco (Portuguese for “hole”), made up of sheet metal shacks on stilts in a suburb of Cayenne.

The place is one of the logistical bases for illegal miners searching for gold in the Amazon rainforest.

The bluish wisps of cannabis resin drift from a group of young people listening to Brazilian music lying on the sofa of a hut overlooking the sewage of the ‘favela’ (slum).

The gendarmes from the Matoury locality carry out this patrol daily.

They often come across women preparing supplies for the illegal miners’ camps, men who are ill after weeks of work in the jungle, and gang members who come to the area to forget about it for a while.

According to the authorities, the two predominant gangs are the Comando Vermelho (CV), one of Brazil’s main mafias, and the Família Terror do Amapá (FTA), the Brazilian state separated from French Guiana by the Oyapoque River.

TAKE OVER

Macapá, the capital of Amapá, boasts the highest homicide rate in Brazil: 63.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 22.3 in the country, 16.7 in French Guiana, and 1.3 in France.

The CV and the FTA are involved in all kinds of activities; robberies, arms, and drug trafficking, without forgetting the illegal search for gold, which served them to enter French territory in 2017.

“They penetrate French territory. They drive out the clandestine miners, who have no link with organized crime, and take control of the area, exploiting the sites to finance their organizations,” explains the Justice department prosecutor of Amapá, Hélio Furtado.

The FTA gained a terrible reputation due to its ultra-violent methods, even among its members.

“The most dangerous thing is that these gangs have total control over their members. They don’t hesitate to threaten their family members. Getting into a gang is easy; getting out is almost impossible,” summarizes a French judicial source.

These groups “threaten French Guiana. They are outside the law; nothing stops them”, emphasizes commissioner Bruno Almeida of the Civil Police of Amapá.

The members of the Brazilian factions have imposed their methods on Guyanese criminality.

“Their main interests are gold, money, and weapons. They seized control of the [local] gangs. We have seen a series of violent robberies of homes, with people tied up,” says a source close to these files.

“They are almost like kamikazes. They have no limits,” says prosecutor Sollier. “They can kill someone for a yes or no,” he adds.

BIG RAID

In 2022, some fifty homicides were counted in Guyana.

“A good part of them is attributable to these criminal factions,” says the magistrate, who does not hesitate to speak of “executions”.

The lawyer of Cayenne, Saphia Benhamida, also speaks of the “settling of scores in broad daylight”.

The French authorities have become aware of the extent of the threat. In September, the government announced the dispatch of specialized reinforcements – gendarmes and magistrates – following a series of murders during the summer.

At the beginning of February, and after more than a year of investigations, an extensive operation involving 200 gendarmes led to the arrest of 14 people allegedly involved in a Franco-Brazilian criminal organization suspected of preparing armed robberies.

Their membership is not in doubt. Numerous inscriptions of the acronym FTA in yellow paint were found on the walls and vehicles of some of those arrested.

Like the drug traffickers, the ringleaders take advantage of the precarious situation in this territory to hire new faces.

“Guyana and Brazil are very close. With speedboats, they can be here one day and there the next,” observes Brazilian commissioner Bruno Almeida.

“In Brazil, they are also wanted, which is one reason why they cross the border sometimes, to rest for a while. But not for long, because they take advantage of the opportunities here,” comments a judicial source.

Those arrested and convicted in Guyana are incarcerated in the Rémire-Montjoly prison on the outskirts of Cayenne.

RECRUITMENT IN PRISON

“In Rémire, there are 50% foreigners, half of whom are Brazilians,” notes Prosecutor General Sollier.

Proof of their presence in thIS prison is that one of the isolation zones of this prison was named “Macapá”, the name of the capital of the State of Amapá, where the FTA members come from, according to a lawyer from Cayenne.

As requested by AFP, the French Ministry of Justice acknowledged that “the problem of gangs” and ringleaders is “a major security issue at the Rémire-Montjoly penitentiary”.

Even behind the bars of Brazil’s high-security prisons, they continue to run their businesses.

“They manage to corrupt lawyers; the guards bring them cell phones, there are people who throw phones to them over the prison walls, relatives who get information in and out,” lists commissioner Almeida.

With information from AFP