On the morning of 23 November 2020, Federal Highway Police (PRF) agents on duty on the BR-116, near Vitoria da Conquista, in Bahia, ordered a tourist bus to stop. The car was about to complete a journey of more than 20 hours, from São Paulo to Boques, within Bahia. During a search of the passenger compartment, the weight of two backpacks caught the attention of the police, who asked their owners to open them. Inside were 23 9mm pistols, produced by the Croatian company HS Produkt, with the serial numbers deleted.
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What could have been just another arrest during a routine approach ended up becoming the first step in one of the largest arms and drug trafficking investigations in the country’s history – which, in its latest development, revealed the infiltration of the Comando Vermelho (CV), Rio’s largest faction, into Rio de Janeiro’s politics.
Since 2023, the thread pulled by the federal police on seized pistols has led to high-ranking Paraguayan military personnel, South America’s largest arms trafficker and, last September, then-state Rep. Thiego Raymundo dos Santos Silva, T.S. Goias, and former Secretary of State for Sports and Recreation Alessandro Caracina.
The connection between the criminal world and the complexities of Rio’s political world has been exposed thanks to a series of court-authorized breaches of confidentiality, which over the past five years have revealed a web of relationships between arms traffickers, the Paraguayan army, faction members, police and state politicians.
However, the impetus that led to the unraveling of the story was the pattern observed by agents from the Service for the Suppression of the Arms Trade and the Special Group for Sensitive Investigations (Gise) of the police forces of Bahia, in the pistols found on the bus in Vitoria da Conquista: in just over a year, about a hundred weapons of the same caliber and of the same manufacturer – quite unusual in the Brazilian illegal market – were seized in five different states.
Federal police officers then began working to recover the serial numbers, which had been deliberately deleted, to try to trace the source of the weapons. Based on the work carried out by the police forces, identification marks for 13 weapons were revealed and sent to the manufacturer. Answer: All pistols were imported into Paraguay by International Auto Supply (IAS), based in Asuncion.
The company became the focus of the investigation: documents and exchanges of letters from employees, obtained by the police forces, through a breach of confidentiality, revealed that IAS obtained the pistols for about 220 euros (about 1,400 Brazilian reais), simulating their legal sale to third parties and passing them on to accomplices who concealed their serial numbers to supply Brazilian criminal groups.
According to the investigation, the same process was repeated with Czech rifles, which were also directed at Brazilian criminals in a secret manner. The scheme, according to PF, had the help of corrupt military personnel from the Dirección de Material Bélico (Dimabel), an arms control body in Paraguay, who agreed to simulate imports and sales in exchange for the payment of bribes.
Based on the investigation, police forces launched Operation Dacovo on 5 December 2023 to execute 25 arrest warrants – eight in Brazil and 15 in Paraguay. Among the targets were Paraguayan Army General Jorge Antonio Ouro Roa, a former director of Dimable, and Argentine Diego Hernan Derecio, the owner of IAS and identified by the National Front as the largest arms trafficker in South America. The Brazilian government currently wants Dericio, who was arrested in Argentina, to be extradited to stand trial in Brazil.
The investigation also identified faction members in Brazil that purchased weapons from the International Islamic League. One of them was Felipe da Silva Gregorio, Professor, one of the drug lords of Complexo do Alemão, who obtained the guns from Derecio through an intermediary, the Paraguayan Julio César Cubas Cantero, alias Taito, responsible for transporting the weapons from the border to Rio de Janeiro. The professor was arrested as part of Operation Dakovo, but was not found until he was shot in the head last June. The police concluded that the drug dealer committed suicide.
Through the exchange of messages extracted from the Professor and Taito’s WhatsApp accounts, a new character came to light: a man with the nickname “Indian” who was the Professor’s partner in the arms and ammunition shipments that came to Rio. In one conversation, from May 2022, the professor and his partner agreed to split payment for a shipment of rifles that had just arrived: “I’ll pay the guy now, these four that arrived today. You pay two and I’ll pay two, okay?”, the professor explained. The partner responded by sending proof of payment.
During Operation Dakovo, Indio was not identified, but the conversations and the number he used were sent by agents in Bahia to the Drug Suppression Department in Rio, which requested a new breach of confidentiality.
When analyzing the contents of the account of Indio – identified as Gabriel Dias de Oliveira, head of the drug trafficking department of the favela do Lixao, in Duque de Caxias – agents found a new aspect of the investigation: conversations between the drug trafficker and figures from the political scene of Rio de Janeiro, such as Rep. T. A. Goias and former Secretary Caracina, revealed the faction’s attempts to overtly influence the police, pay bribes, demand ransom for stolen cars and even a face-to-face meeting between Indio and Guttemberg de Paula Fonseca, Minister of Consumer Protection, to discuss “political coverage”. Gutemberg denies that this meeting took place. In a statement to the National Front, Karasina confirmed that he had heard from Gutemberg that the meeting had taken place.
For the National Front, TH Goias served as the political arm of the faction, defending the interests of criminals before state bodies. According to the investigation report, the new criminal scheme “indicates a deep penetration of the political system and public administration.” Last September, federal agents took to the streets again in Operation Zargon and arrested Indio, TH, and Karacina.
But it seems that the investigations are not over yet: at the moment, agents are analyzing the materials seized from the prisoners and are trying to make progress on the connection between the CV and his contacts in the public authorities.
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