On Thursday, May 28, U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio announced that as of June 5, the U.S. will designate Brazil’s two largest criminal gangs, CV (Comando Vermelho) and PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital), as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). This designation opens the door to enhanced U.S. intelligence and military clandestine and destabilizing operations in Brazil, in a manner parallel to increased U.S. pressure on Mexico on the same grounds. It also has major economic warfare implications. The two Brazilian crime syndicates have developed sophisticated front operations intersecting Brazil’s banking, agrobusiness, and telecommunications sectors. The FTO designation allows U.S. government entities to apply sanctions or other legal scrutiny to all such businesses, with an immediate chilling effect and longer-term potential for severe economic destabilization.
The Rubio announcement came just days after Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the former President Jair Bolsonaro (who is currently in serving a sentence for sponsoring a coup attempt against President Lula da Silva in early 2003), met with Trump at the White House May 26 and urged the U.S. to apply the “terrorist” designation. He had a longer meeting with Rubio the next day. Bolsonaro is a leading candidate against Lula in Brazilian elections scheduled for October, and hopes to tar Lula with a “soft on crime” label. Flavio’s campaign had been hit hard in recent weeks by revelations of intimate financial connections to a Brazilian sleazebag banker whose banking empire had imploded in late 2015. He hopes his “tough on crime” card punched in D.C. will revive his flagging presidential run.
It’s not the first time Trump has weighed in with blatant political backing for the Bolsonaro clan. Last July, he applied a 50% tariff surcharge on Brazil with the explicit demand Brazil back off from prosecuting ex-President Jair Bolsonaro for the 2023 coup attempt. Trump had seemed to move away from such flagrant intervention during meetings with Lula in the fall of 2025, and again at the beginning of May 2026. At the White House on May 7, Lula, knowing neo-cons around Rubio were urging the FTO designations, presented four planks of a policy to increase measures against the CV and PCC, including increased U.S. cooperation in going after the international financial connections of the gangs, all under Brazilian sovereign and institutional control.
