Ghost Guns Are Increasingly Empowering Brazil’s Powerful Gangs

A recent and extremely deadly anti-gang raid in Rio de Janeiro underscores both the escalating firepower of Brazil’s gangs and the growing challenge authorities face as criminal groups diversify their arms supplies.

Rio de Janeiro’s police conducted a violent raid on October 28 that killed an estimated 130 people, and was the city’s most lethal operation against organized crime to date. Police seized at least 90 rifles in that one incident, almost twice as many compared to the 47 recorded in all of September in Rio. 

The recent bust aligns with a broader trend of increased weapons seizures as Brazilian criminal organizations expand their rifle arsenals and diversify methods for acquiring firearms. The production of improvised rifles, or “ghost guns,” is on the up.

Trends in the use of military firearms by Brazil’s criminal organizations are the focus of the recent academic article “Blind Fire: The Rise of Military-Style Firearms amid Regulatory Failures and Data Deficiency in Brazil,” published in the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, by Bruno Langeani and Natalia Pollachi.

As well as an increase in the illegal, homemade production of military-grade weapons in the country, the authors reported changes in the modus operandi around the acquisition of weapons. The authors analyzed data to identify failures in information collection by Brazilian authorities and highlighted relevant, recent improvements in security strategies.

InSight Crime spoke with Langeani about arms trafficking routes, ghost rifles, and policies to tackle the issue.

SEE ALSO: Arms Trafficking Case Puts Europe-Paraguay Pipeline on the Map

InSight Crime (IC): Brazil’s Southeast, which includes the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo, has a central role in arms trafficking routes. Why did you decide to look into this specific region? 

Bruno Langeani (BL): We decided to focus on the southeast for two reasons. The first is methodological, because we’ve investigated the firearms market for a while and know how data is problematic and fragile, so we had to select just one region in Brazil to analyze. 

But the other incentive was contextual: Brazil’s southeast is the region that seizes the most firearms and is the homebase of the two biggest criminal organizations in the country – the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC), from São Paulo, and the Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV), from Rio de Janeiro.

And even though military-style arms do not represent the majority of the arms seized in Brazil, we decided to analyze these weapons with greater firepower because they are crucial for criminal groups to expand control. Gangs use this type of weapon not only to commit crimes such as bank robberies and executions, but also in operations to increase territory. 

IC: In the article, you also analyze ghost rifles (i.e. homemade or improvised firearms), mentioning that they started being more frequently seized in Brazil around 2017. What explains the arrival of ghost rifles in the country in this specific period?

BL: 2017 was a year of widespread expansion by organized crime, and war between gangs. Brazil was seeing huge rebellions, frequent territorial disputes and deaths in the conflicts between criminal groups. The result was a significant increase in gangs’ demand for firearms.

But at that time criminals did not have good local alternatives to get rifles: gangs either had to corrupt a public official or turn to the foreign market, which made weapons expensive. So they started searching for alternatives. Homemade arms had the benefit of being cheaper, untraceable, and built of parts that are easier to obtain, especially from the US market. 

Currently, we believe that ghost rifles are on the rise, as the number of improvised arms’ seizures is growing compared to the total number of seized rifles. What’s more, the production modus operandi is changing. Arms used to be made at home with parts that came from the United States. But beginning in 2023, clandestine factories started to appear and produce rifles on an industrial scale, with much more modern machines, such as 3D printers.

Besides enabling the building of a much higher number of rifles in shorter periods of time, this new method does not depend on external parts, as criminals produce everything in the factories, and weapons are more durable and precise than those produced at home.

IC: You mention that the Brazilian authorities focus too much on incidents involving the possession and carrying of weapons, but not on tackling trafficking and the production of improvised guns. What are the positive elements of existing policies, and what should change to increase the effectiveness of the state’s response to this problem?

On a positive note, we have seen some states create specialized police stations to combat arms trafficking. There, they work on deeper intelligence reports and can identify the most sources of firearms in the state. 

This is important because even when looking at a relatively small region such as the southeast, trafficking dynamics are very different from state to state, so you can’t apply one state’s diagnostics to the other without evaluating specific conditions. Authorities should adapt policies according to trafficking dynamics, with increased attention to specific borders linked to local routes, for example. 

But there are still policy aspects that need to be improved. Policies in Brazil aimed at arms trafficking are still in very early stages of development, so we don’t have structured measures to tackle the issue yet. And even with advances, the investigation of dynamics either doesn’t exist or is flawed in some cases. When talking about the issue, authorities generally don’t have data on what is entering the market or on the percentage of ghost guns. They often don’t even know that homemade submachine guns exist.

We recommend strengthening the Federal Police’s tracking center, which takes care of monitoring routes. Besides directly seizing arms, they also support the states in regional seizures. Considering that Brazil seizes around 100,000 arms per year, we believe that this center should be much larger to handle the volume of trafficking.

SEE ALSO: OAS Report Flags Short-Term Strategies to Limit LatAm Arms Trafficking

IC: How could investments in data collection help solve the issue and ground more efficient policies?

BL: One of our main achievements with the article was to clean and organize data that was flawed due to low quality and registration problems. We spent at least eight months dealing with these issues, which would be simple for authorities to solve. The standardization of data and increased training for police officers responsible for registering seized guns, along with a greater integration between officers in the field and those producing intelligence reports, would help to deal with issues regarding data collection.

Procedures such as reporting identified attempts to erase the weapon’s serial number, the lack of a weapon identification number, or that it appears to be a homemade weapon would be very easy to implement, but the police don’t seem concerned about doing so.

If the police had better data, they would be able to notice and deal with these dynamics much faster, and it would be easier to coordinate effective interventions.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and fluidity.  

Featured Image: Weapons seized by Rio de Janeiro Military Police in 2018. Credit: Rio de Janeiro Military Police.

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