I’ve been intrigued by the Brazilian PCC—First Command of the Capital, a nominal "gang" operating out of Sao Paulo—for some time now. Now a useful, if exceedingly silly/reactionary article from Der Spiegel (which I find via Jon via Tim) has prompted a post on the subject. The article painfully attempts to avoid the radical potential of so-called "gangs" while simultaneously if unconsciously showing that potential.

Examples: "They’ve built a parallel government," the journalist notes. Yep, it’s called "building dual power." Their motto: "All for one, one for all." They are romanticized by narco-corridas. "Members of the Columbian [sic.] FARC guerrilla group work as advisors" to the PCC. Coincidence?

Of course, it’s not that the author fails to grasp the connection. He’s merely from the dishonest right, the right whose ideological maneuvers are fairly transparent: when the PCC launched 293 attacks in 4 days (targeted directly, it should be said, at the police), the police "reacted unusually violently" when they slaughtered 107 people. Not unusual at all: even mainstream press reported on the "death squads" operated by the Sao Paulo police.

(The more honest right can be seen, as is often the case, arguing the leftist connections of "gangs," but only for the sake of dismissing both, condemning the Brazilian penal system for being too focused on rehabilitaion, and calling for Rudy Giuliani’s intervention. This dude’s site is pretty sick—he’s a missionary in Brazil).

What the honest right recognizes and the dishonest right (which, to be clear, is largely composed of liberals) neglects is the fact that "gangs" can have ideologies. And the ideology of the PCC, as it emerged in a statement after the attacks, is loosely leftist and based around radical prison reform. Further, the PCC’s statues include the following first three points:

1. Loyalty, respect and solidarity to the Party, above all.

2. The Struggle for liberty, justice and peace.

3. The unity of the Struggle against injustice and opression inside prisons.

Further down:

13. We must remain united and organized to avoid a similar or worse massacre as the one which occured in October 2nd, 1992, when 111 prisoners were cowardly murdered, a massacre that will never be forgotten in the consciousness of the Brazilian society. For we from the Command will change prison practices [that are], inhumane, full of injustices, opressive, [with] torture and prison massacres.

14. The priority of the Command is to put pressure on the State Government to deactivate the Concentration Camp of House of Custody and Treatment of Taubaté, from where the roots of the Comand originated, in the middle of such inglorious and atrocious suffering.

The statutes conclude with:

We know our strength and the strength of our Powerful enemies, but we are ready and united, and a united people will never be defeated. LIBERTY! JUSTICE! AND PEACE!

The erasure of this radical foundation—an erasure deeply rooted in liberal understandings of nonviolence—threatens to disarm radical movements more generally. To dismiss as "gangs" such organizations as the PCC and the Venezuelan Tupamaros and non-organized local self-defense operations is to perform a reactionary dismissal of the sort historically deployed against, e.g., the Black Panthers. (Recall, too, that history has erased the fact that, after the 1992 L.A. riots, the Bloods and Crips presented a unified plan for self-defense).

This isn’t to argue that violent crime is a good thing, but rather to direct our gaze, if momentarily, away from an exceedingly liberal emphasis on violence as aberration, an emphasis which thereby invokes a steady-state norm. To focus so directly on violent acts, moreover, merely facilitates the conflation of radical violence with "gang" violence, smearing both as untrustworthy to good humanitarians.

UPDATE: Hassan sends this on from the BBC: "For their part, Alckmin supporters have hinted at grassroots links between the PCC and the governing Workers Party (PT) of President Luiz Inacio Lula
da Silva. Reportedly based on wiretap evidence, the accusation has not been proven, and has been furiously denied by the PT." If true, this might make me like the PT much more…