Brazil rejects US request to classify local gangs as terrorist organisations

BRASILIA — The Brazilian government rejected a request by the US State Department to designate two major criminal gangs that officials believe to have members in the United States as terrorist organisations, Mario Sarrubo, Brazil's national secretary of public security, told Reuters on Wednesday (May 7).

He said the request was made on Tuesday during a meeting between David Gamble, who leads the sanctions strategy for the US State Department, six other officials from President Donald Trump's administration, and eight Brazilian officials in Brasilia.

Gamble was concerned about the gangs Primeiro Comando da Capital, known as PCC, and Comando Vermelho, known as CV, which control territories in several Brazilian cities.

Trump has been trying to tie his aggressive crackdown on immigration to the presence of members of Latin American criminal gangs in US cities. Earlier this year, the US government designated several drug cartels as terrorist organisations, including Venezuela's Tren de Aragua and El Salvador's MS13.

"We don't have terrorist organisations here, we have criminal organisations that have infiltrated society," Sarrubo, who wasn't in the meeting, said. But Brazilian law, he added, only considers organisations that violently clash with the government for religious or racial reasons to be terrorists.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of Latin American immigrants, alleging they were gang members, though it presented little evidence of their criminal ties.

At the meeting in Brasilia, US officials informed their Brazilian counterparts that their request was part of an effort to address immigration and criminal gangs with a transnational presence, saying they were priorities to the Trump administration, one source who was present said.

US officials said a terrorist designation could help the government apply sanctions, raise resources and target criminal supply chains, the same source added.

According to this source, US officials said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had reported the PCC and the Comando Vermelho had cells in 12 US states, mainly Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Connecticut and Tennessee.

Those reports, the source added, alleged that the gangs trafficked guns and laundered money through Brazilians who travelled to the US, adding that 113 people were denied visas to enter the country because of connections to organised crime in 2024 alone.

In March, the US Attorney's Office charged 18 Brazilians with trafficking several types of firearms within the US Some of the illegal activities, the government said, had ties to the PCC, and many of the Brazilians who were charged were in the US illegally.

On Monday, the office of Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, said he met with Trump Organisation officials to deliver a dossier that he said included intelligence information that tied both the PCC and the CV to terrorist acts.

The US embassy in Brasilia did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Source: Reuters