Brazil rejects US request to classify local gangs as terrorist organizations

8/5/2025 6:03

The Brazilian government

rejected a request by the U.S. State Department to designate two

major criminal gangs that officials believe to have members in

the United States as terrorist organizations, Mario Sarrubo,

Brazil's national secretary of public security, told Reuters on

Wednesday.



He said the request was made on Tuesday during a meeting

between David Gamble, who leads the sanctions strategy for the

U.S. 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 U.S. cities. Earlier this year, the U.S.

government designated several drug cartels as terrorist

organizations, including Venezuela's Tren de Aragua and El

Salvador's MS13.



"We don't have terrorist organizations here, we have

criminal organizations that have infiltrated society," Sarrubo,

who wasn't in the meeting, said. But Brazilian law, he added,

only considers organizations 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, U.S. 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.



U.S. 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, U.S. officials said the Federal

Bureau of Investigation had reported the PCC and the Comando

Vermelho had cells in 12 U.S. 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

traveled to the U.S., adding that 113 people were denied visas

to enter the country because of connections to organized crime

in 2024 alone.



In March, the U.S. Attorney's Office charged 18 Brazilians

with trafficking several types of firearms within the U.S. Some

of the illegal activities, the government said, had ties to the

PCC, and many of the Brazilians who were charged were in the

U.S. illegally.



On Monday, the office of Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of

former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, said he met with

Trump Organization officials to deliver a dossier that he said

included intelligence information that tied both the PCC and the

CV to terrorist acts.



The U.S. embassy in Brasilia did not immediately reply to a

request for comment.