The Brazilian Federal Police dismantled this Wednesday a plan by which members of the First Command of the Capital (PCC), the largest criminal organization in the country, planned to kidnap different authorities and invade prisons to try to rescue their main leaders.
Source: EFE
The plan was dismantled through an operation by which Federal Police agents served today ten arrest warrants and thirteen search warrants in the states of Sao Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul and Brasilia against the people who had been articulating the spectacular escape.
According to the Federal Police, the objective of the plan was to rescue some of the PCC leaders who are imprisoned in the federal prisons of Brasilia and Porto Velho, which are the most secure in the country and to which the most dangerous inmates are sent.
Among the prisoners who would be rescued are Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as ‘Marcola’, Claudio Barbará da Silva, alias ‘Barbará’, and Valdeci Alves dos Santos, also called ‘Colorido’, considered the main leaders of the PCC.
Among the people arrested this Wednesday, Marcola’s wife and Barbara’s sister-in-law stand out.
The PCC was born two decades ago in the prisons of the state of Sao Paulo, from where they controlled drug trafficking in various regions of the country, and grew to become the largest mafia in Brazil with tentacles in countries like Bolivia and Paraguay.
According to a statement from the Federal Police, the members of the PCC planned to kidnap some authorities, and had already been following up on high-ranking leaders of the Brazilian prison system, to try to exchange them for the imprisoned leaders.
Likewise, they planned armed attacks on the penitentiaries, even using helicopters, as well as organizing rebellions in them to distract the authorities and facilitate escapes.
The plan was discovered thanks to the fact that the authorities perceived that the mafia leaders had been using a network of lawyers, with whom they conversed in code, to serve as intermediaries in communications with their accomplices in freedom.
These lawyers “transmitted both the messages of those in custody and the responses of the criminals involved in the rescue plan,” according to the Federal Police statement.
“To organize illicit activities, those under investigation made use of visits to lawyers to communicate with codes referring to legal situations that do not exist,” the note adds.
Among those investigated are four lawyers with law firms in Brasilia and six in Sao Paulo.
The judge who ordered the arrests on Wednesday had also authorized prior wiretapping of those under investigation, which made it possible to establish that the escape was imminent.
