Comando Vermelho

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Comando Vermelho (Portuguese for Red Command) is a Brazilian criminal organization founded in 1979 in the prison Cândido Mendes, on the Ilha Grande island, Rio de Janeiro, as a collection of ordinary convicts and political prisoners who were members of the Falange Vermelha (Red Phalanx), which fought the military dictatorship. During the entire 1990s the criminal organization was the strongest in all of Rio de Janeiro, but today the principal leaders have been arrested or are dead, and the organization is not as strong.

The Comando Vermelho still control parts of the city and seeing streets tagged with "CV" is common in many favelas in Rio de Janeiro. The principal rival gangs of the Comando Vermelho is the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP, Pure Third Command) and Amigos dos Amigos (ADA, Friends of Friends). The TCP emerged out of a power struggle amongst the leaders of Comando Vermelho during the mid-1980s.

1 Comando Vermelho and Funk
2 Comando Vermelho in the News and Media
3 References
4 See also

[edit] Comando Vermelho and Funk

The Comando is always looking to attract new Brazilian youth and bring them into their ranks. In addition to sponsoring groups like neighborhood associations and special interest clubs, and organizing sporting events, one of the most common ways in which the criminal organization is able to catch the youth's attention is through the popular musical style of funk, a form of Brazilian "booty music" derived from Miami Bass. Due to the genre's popularity with young Brazilians, the group "is known to have subsized funk parties to recruit young kids for drug dealing". ^[1]

In addition to these funk parties (bailes funk), "where drugs and sex attract even bourgeois or petty-bourgeois youth"^[2] held regularly by the organization every Sunday, funk artists are also sponsored by the Comando Vermelho to record songs and even entire CDs that promote the group and eulogize the group's dead members. Because the Comando pays for the production and recording of the funk songs, they "are often well recorded and of a high technical quality, and are being played on pirate radio stations and sold by hundreds of street vendors in Rio de Janeiro and in São Paulo". ^[3] Thus the funk artists that are in league with Comando Vermelho sometimes garner significant sales and airplay despite making a type of music that is Proibidão, or "extremely prohibited", in terms of where it can be sold and who can play it. In addition to promoting the crime group, the funk sponsored by the Comando also challenges the ideas and laws of the Division of the Repression Against Drugs. ^[4]

[edit] Comando Vermelho in the News and Media

The video Comando Vermelho Gang Membersshows a first hand experience with gang members of the Comando Vermelho and also interviews two members of the Red Command. In late June 2007, Rio de Janeiro police launched a large-scale assault on the area where up to 24 people were killed. [3]

Ross Kemp made a documentary about the Red Command (CV). The movie "City of God" or "Cidade de Deus" shows the early beginnings of Comando Vermelho. The DVD release of this movie contains an extra documentary "Notes of a Private War" which features interviews with the police and local children from the favelas (slums).

[edit] References

^ Behague, Gerard. "Rap, Reggae, Rock, or Samba: The Local and the Global in Brazilian Popular Music (1985-95)." Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006)
^ [1] Benoit, Hector. "Brazil: The social contradictions underlying the violent eruption in Sao Paulo," 18 May 2006. World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved of 14 February 2008.]
^ [2] Benoit, Hector. "Brazil: The social contradictions underlying the violent eruption in Sao Paulo," 18 May 2006. World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved of 14 February 2008.]
^ Behague, Gerard. "Rap, Reggae, Rock, or Samba: The Local and the Global in Brazilian Popular Music (1985-95)." Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 79-90