Front line in war between drug factions, Manaus’ Compensa neighborhood lives bloody days

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Authorities are investigating an alliance between the Familia do Norte and Terceiro Comando Puro against the Comando Vermelho (CV), which partially dominates the region. A new group, Cartel do Norte, may also be involved in the killings.

“Attention: Uber or residents of Compensa 1, 2 and 3, when entering the neighborhood please lower the car windows and turn off the headlights for your own safety. We are at war. Signed CV.” The message, spray-painted on a wall on Brasil Avenue in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, is aimed at outsiders: the over 75,000 inhabitants of the Compensa neighborhood know that the place has become, in recent years, one of the main front lines in the violent clash between criminal factions.

Located in the western part of the capital, the poor neighborhood is coveted by organized crime for its strategic location on the banks of the Negro River. Its dozens of moorings and piers with little surveillance facilitate the loading and unloading of cocaine shipments coming directly from Colombia – or through Venezuela. Compensa is in the middle of the Solimões Route, the main international drug trafficking corridor in the country that uses the Negro, Içá, Japurá, and Solimões rivers to bring the drugs to Brazil and then ship them to European and African ports.

The message’s alarmist tone painted on the wall is justified. February, March and April were bloody months in Compensa, with a massacre that left 4 dead and another 20 homicides (one of them a 15 year-old girl), making the area the most violent in Manaus this year according to official statistics. Public Security Secretary of Amazonas Colonel Louismar Bonates confirmed that the place is experiencing problems. “We are working in the neighborhood, which is having a certain difficulty in terms of security,” he said in early February.

Currently Compensa is mostly under the control of the Comando Vermelho. After an offensive in early 2020, the traffickers linked to the Rio de Janeiro group established their dominance and hegemony over most favelas in Manaus. To celebrate they sponsored a fireworks display at each takeover of rival territories, making the nights of February that year seem like New Year’s Eve: each neighborhood conquered, a new apotheosis of crime.

But Compensa did not always have a strong CV presence. The neighborhood is considered historical for Amazonian drug dealers precisely because it saw the birth, in 2007, of its first faction, the Família do Norte (FDN). One of its founders, José Roberto Barbosa, aka Zé da Compensa, lived in the neighborhood and even helped create a neighborhood soccer team, Compensão, which with the help of drug money won the second division of the Amazonas state championship in 2009.

Unknown to most Brazilians, in 2017 the FDN presented its calling card to the country after massacring more than 50 prisoners from the rival drug gang Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) during a riot at the Anísio Jobim Penitentiary Complex, a feat repeated by the criminals in 2019 in that same unit. The faction, then allied with the CV, seemed to have triumphed within the prison system and on the streets, having curbed the expansionism of the PCC. But in the trafficking market, victories tend to be short-lived.

With its main leaders arrested and sent to federal penitentiaries after the prison massacres, the FDN cracked, lost strength, and began to crumble, having been largely cannibalized and absorbed by the CV. As a result, the Rio de Janeiro group has become the largest force in Amazonas. “That’s the situation. On the streets and in the prisons, the CV is now dominant in Manaus and in the state,” says Armando Gurgel Maia, prosecutor for the Special Action Group for Fighting Organized Crime  (GAECO) in Amazonas.

The period that followed the seizure of power by the Rio de Janeiro group in Compensa in 2020 was relatively calm for the residents – with occasional incidents of violence. The faction imposed its version of the criminal court, acting in the mediation of conflicts among the population, in the mold of what the PCC does in São Paulo.

“I had a neighbor who got beaten up by her husband every day. Then one time she decided to call the police. The police came and took the bastard away. After a couple of days he came home. That’s when they [the CV] got together, dragged him outside, beat him up and told him they didn’t want the police here. The next time he hit his wife, they would put an end to him. This woman has never been beaten again,” says 37 year old M. L., who lives in the neighborhood.

In January, retired V.S.S., 74 years old (30 of them lived in Compensa), celebrated the prevailing peace: “It has been more than a year since there have been any shootings here. If it continues the way it is, for me it’s great. If I want to, I can sleep with the window open.”

But the balance of power in a place as central to drug trafficking is ephemeral. According to GAECO’s Maia, the interception of some salves (communications issued by the criminals) shows that in order to stay alive the FDN has forged alliances with the Rio de Janeiro faction Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), a rival of the CV and, ironically, close to the PCC (massacred by the FDN in Manaus).

This shows how fluid and unstable any accommodation of organized crime in the state is: “Faction dynamics are pressure cookers, everything can change in moments,” says the prosecutor.

It is still unclear to the authorities if the deaths that occurred in Compensa between February and April are the result of clashes between the CV and this still incipient alliance between the FDN and TCP, or if it is an internal settling of scores within the Rio de Janeiro faction.

There is yet another line of investigation, which would be related to the emergence of a new group, called Cartel do Norte, that graffitied walls in some communities in Manaus and threatened CV drug traffickers.

Whatever the case, the war between factions in the largest state of the North is still far from over.

Source: El Pais

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