One morning about a year ago, three men and a woman called at Luiza’s home in the Brazilian coastal city of Fortaleza offering a choice: a beating or a bullet.
Her transgression, according to the drug dealers, was to have spoken with a member of a rival mob. As if by miracle, a police car arrived and they scattered. But it was only the start of the ordeal for the grandmother, one of hundreds here forced to flee such persecution.
“I lost everything — my job, my belongings, my house. My family couldn’t contact me,” recounted Luiza, not her real name, now living in a different area. “This is oppression of ordinary citizens.”
Tales of violence and intimidation at the hands of narcotics trafficking gangs abound in the capital of Ceará, a state in Brazil’s poor north-east that is emblematic of the scourge of organised crime spreading across Latin America’s most populous nation.
The issue is shaping up to be a key theme in elections later this year, when leftwing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will seek a fourth term.
Ceará, popular with holidaymakers for its idyllic beaches, has emerged over the past decade as an important cocaine export corridor, fuelled by drug-taking in rich countries. Contraband is shipped across the Atlantic via ports in or near Fortaleza, one of the closest points in South America to Europe.
Turf wars and territorial domination by narcos, especially in low-income areas, have inflicted terror on civilians in the state, which was the most murderous per capita in the country last year. Residents speak of shop owners facing extortion and of punishment beatings. More than 200 families were expelled from their homes by criminal factions between 2024 and 2025, according to a police report.
“Ceará has become a bloody land, where organised crime is intensely active in [coercing] businesses,” said Wagner Sousa Gomes, a former military police captain and ex-congressman. “It has reached unsustainable levels. People can no longer stand the dominance of crime.”
Despite a fall in the overall number of murders in Brazil over the past five years, the perceived rise in the power of the underworld — and its tentacles into the economy — is a top concern for voters nationwide.
Ceará, with a population of 9mn, displays some of the most acute symptoms. Small internet providers have been targeted, with fibre optic cables attacked when they refuse to comply. Even seafront coconut sellers have reportedly been pressured into paying “taxes”.
The homicide rate here stood at about 32 per 100,000 people in 2025 — more than double the national average, with almost 3,000 killings — even after an 8 per cent drop from the previous year. The state government estimates nine in 10 violent deaths result from territorial conflicts between criminal groups.
In the Pirambu district of Fortaleza, a few miles from sunbathing tourists, a taxi driver recalls how a blogger was shot dead in 2022 after reporting on the arrest of a double homicide suspect. “The state isn’t in control any more, the criminal factions are,” he said.
Gangs have also attempted to infiltrate politics in small towns in the countryside, according to Thiago Rocha Vasconcelos, a researcher at the Brazilian Forum of Public Security think-tank: “They mobilise voter bases and ban candidates from campaigning in some areas.”
The problems in Ceará reflect a wider pattern of violent crime in Brazil’s north-east, a deprived region famous for its coastline and a political stronghold for Lula. The country’s most powerful criminal syndicates have expanded from their original bases in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, seeking new retail markets and alternative ports for shipping cocaine produced in Andean countries to the west.
Those active in Ceará include Brazil’s largest cartel, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), founded in 1993 in the aftermath of a São Paulo jail massacre. Another is the Comando Vermelho, which began as a self-protection group for Rio prisoners in the 1970s. In a significant development, it became the dominant outlaw force in Fortaleza around the turn of the year, according to researchers, residents and officials.
Its seizure of territories diminished the influence of the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), a rival Rio faction that absorbed some other local outfits last September. Throughout the metropolitan region, home to almost half of the state’s population, the initials CV are graffitied on walls, with the insignia of other factions crossed out.
Until not long ago, there were no-go borders between bairros (districts) in Fortaleza under the sway of competing groups, said Juliana Mamede, who heads a unit at the University of Fortaleza providing legal and other support services to victims of violence such as Luiza.
This prevented people accessing health clinics and other public services. Thugs have kicked people out of housing complexes for simply having previously lived in an area controlled by a rival outfit, according to Mamede, and many victims of forced displacements are afraid to report incidents. “They don’t feel comfortable making complaints at police stations, because they say that the information leaks.”
Ceará is governed by President Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), which rightwing opponents accuse of being soft on crime. The governor and his public security chief declined interview requests, but officials here defend the state’s record and point to recent improvements. In February, Ceará recorded the fewest deaths in a month from violent crimes since records began in 2009.
Harley Filho, co-ordinator of operational planning in the public security department, said arrests of gang members almost doubled to 2,500 in 2025 and that expulsions are down significantly. He hails large cocaine seizures as evidence of progress. “We are reaping the fruit of the work realised over recent years,” said the career detective, stressing that unlike in Rio de Janeiro, police can patrol anywhere in Ceará.
However, many in Fortaleza believe that the CV’s ascendancy is the main factor behind the drop in violence and killings, as well as the greater ease of movement between gang-controlled areas, because it has reduced inter-factional disputes.
Yet there are fears that an effective criminal monopoly may lead to more extortive practices, such as charging residents for access to water, gas and electricity.
In the semi-rural badlands an hour outside Fortaleza, where scrubby plains meet green mountains, the menace of illegality is keenly felt. Fixing his pick-up truck by a roadside hamlet, one man said a neighbour was murdered in bed for calling the police, while his brother had to skip town after falling foul of gangsters. “If we talk, they’ll arrive right away. There’s no state here.”
The failings of public authorities lead some residents to profess sympathy for the outlaws. A teenage grocery store cashier in Pacatuba, a town where an entire neighbourhood was expelled last year, said the gangs give a sense of safety on the streets for women: “Like it or not, sometimes we feel more trust in them than the police, who rarely send patrol cars.”
Retired army general Guilherme Theophilo, a Ceará native who served in the administration of former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, argued that the judiciary had been too lenient. He supported the hardline approach and applauds a police operation in Rio against CV members last year that left 120 people dead.
“The north-east of Brazil is a socialist enclave that is badly managed,” said Theophilo, a senate candidate for a right-wing party.
He said broken homes are a factor. “They don’t have established families and don’t go to school, so crime is the easiest path.” A lack of basic services in poor areas also contributes to the entry of gangs, he added. “In many neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Fortaleza there’s open sewage, with children playing in dirty water. The government has no credibility. Then criminals arrive and provide the internet. People have to pay them to live there. Businesses have to pay to open.”
Harley Filho, the state official, said that punishments need to be toughened. “If a person sentenced to 16 years is free after just four, what kind of justice is that?” He also echoed a federal government proposal for greater integration of different police forces to uncover money laundering.
Others call for action to end the cycles of poverty that make gangs attractive to young men. Sergio Farias, a campaigner in Fortaleza with the Homeless Workers’ Movement, argues for better public policies in education, employment and housing: “The war on drugs has failed. We need a different approach.”
Luiza, who is on medication for anxiety and unable to work, is trying to rebuild her life after being expelled from where she grew up and raised a family. The gang is not present in her new neighbourhood, but she is sceptical that the new territorial dynamics or government promises will bring change. The gangsters “do whatever they want, they have more power than the police”, she said.
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