At the base of the favela, we hailed motorbike taxis and began the climb through narrow, twisting lanes. The air thickened with exhaust and fried food as we passed walls painted in gang colors. It was 2021, the height of Brazil’s COVID crisis. Hospitals were overflowing, the death toll climbing by the thousands each day. Yet nothing could tame Brazilian nightlife. The culture itself seemed immune: loud, physical, and unashamedly alive.
A mile up the hill, the drivers stopped and gestured for us to walk. My friends grew serious. “Don’t pull out your phones,” one said. “Record nothing, and you’ll be fine.” We followed the bass vibrating through the concrete—boom-cha-cha, boom-cha—until we turned a corner and saw it: hundreds of people packed into a square, dancing beneath colored lights, watched from every angle by armed men.
Then the music stopped. The Comando Vermelho, the faction that controls Rocinha, wanted to make its presence known. A procession of boys, most barely twenty, filed in as if on parade. The most common weapons were Glock pistols mounted in PDW kits, with shoulder stocks, foregrips, and extended magazines. Others carried IMBEL FAL rifles, Brazil’s service version of the FN design, rechambered in 5.56mm. Some were stolen from army depots; others sold by corrupt police. A few older guards held pump-action shotguns or AR-15-pattern rifles cobbled from mixed parts. And then came the absurd centerpiece: a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, shirtless and grinning, cradling a Browning .30-caliber machine gun, belts of ammunition draped across his chest like a parody of soldiering.
I made the mistake of raising my phone. A narco stepped out of the crowd, his hand resting on his pistol. He didn’t speak. He just motioned for me to delete the photo. I did, and he watched until it was gone before waving me away. Killing a foreigner would bring too much attention, and the Red Command preferred to keep the police out of their parties.
That was Rocinha’s version of order: young men with military hardware, ruling a city within a city, answerable only to their own command.
The Red Command
The Comando Vermelho—Red Command—was born in the late 1970s inside Rio’s Cândido Mendes Prison on Ilha Grande. Under Brazil’s military dictatorship, Marxist revolutionaries and political dissidents were jailed alongside common criminals. In that mix, ideology and crime fused. The guerrillas taught organization and discipline; the criminals taught how to rule by force. They called themselves the Falange Vermelha—the Red Phalanx—a symbol of solidarity that soon outlived its politics. Profit replaced revolution. By the 1980s, the Red Command controlled much of Rio’s cocaine trade and fortified its favelas into autonomous enclaves. Their motto, Paz, Justiça e Liberdade—Peace, Justice, and Liberty—became darkly ironic as they waged war against both rivals and the state.
War Without End
As of late 2025, the Red Command remains dominant across Rio’s northern and western zones, locked in constant turf wars in Complexo do Alemão, Maré, and Rocinha. Open-source intelligence from Reuters, AP, and Brazilian security analysts shows the group operating through semi-autonomous frentes, each led by local commanders managing supply lines, street enforcement, and weapons procurement. Their arsenal includes AK-pattern rifles, IMBEL FALs, NATO-standard carbines, and an increasing use of drones fitted with improvised explosives and radio jammers—a page borrowed from Mexico’s cartel wars.
The Brazilian response has intensified. BOPE, CORE, and army units have mounted large-scale raids like the October 2025 operation in Complexo da Penha, which left more than sixty people dead—the bloodiest day in Rio’s modern history. Red Command fighters counter with tire barricades, rooftop snipers, and teenage lookouts equipped with encrypted radios. BOPE now relies on drone reconnaissance and caveirão armor to breach the hills, but territorial control remains fleeting. The police clear, withdraw, and the traffickers return. Rio lives in a permanent, low-intensity war: the state by day, the cartels by night.
Going Home
I left the favela alone, around four in the morning. I wanted to see what it felt like to walk out on foot, to take in the silence after the music. My friends had begged me not to, but curiosity won. I kept close to the walls, avoiding the patrols of boys with rifles, each trying to look older than he was. You never know what a teenager with an automatic weapon might decide you are.
Once I passed beyond their zone, the quiet felt heavier than the noise had. The night wasn’t thrilling anymore; it was sad. Brazil is a magnificent country, rich in land, water, and beauty, its coastline rivaling any in the world. Traveling through it, you begin to feel it as an alternate version of the United States—shaped by a different language and faith but born of the same violence. Both nations took fertile land from their natives and built their wealth on enslaved Africans. But Brazil’s monarchy and slave economy endured longer, leaving deeper scars. Even now, inequality is written on every city wall.
The twentieth century added another wound. The United States, fearing communism, backed Brazil’s military dictatorship, which silenced dissent and stunted democracy for a generation. You can still feel its echo in the favelas today: young men inheriting a system that never gave them a future, living by the gun because nothing else was left.
Brazil’s flag reads Ordem e Progresso—order and progress—but the words feel more like a prayer than a promise. I want to believe the new crackdowns will bring peace, yet I know they won’t. The cycle will continue until the country finds a reason for its people to live that is stronger than their reasons to fight.
Fire in the Favelas: Brazilian Police Storm Rio de Janeiro’s Infamous Hills
In Rio, where rainforest meets surf and glass balconies overlook stacked mosaics of tin and prayer, I learned that the state, the narcos, and the civilians breathe the same air while fighting different wars that end at dawn and begin again by night.
Advertisement
