On 28 May 2026, the United States designated the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV) as global terrorist groups. Originating in the country’s prisons, they are Brazil’s largest criminal organizations and have grown into transnational enterprises involved in drug trafficking and territorial control. In the communities under their control, they enforce their own rules, resolve disputes, collect payments for basic services, and use violence to punish those who defy them.

The U.S. designation records that the factions operate across national borders and have a substantial presence, while also characterizing them as violent. It invokes a 1996 statute and an executive order signed in the weeks following September 2001, but goes no further. It does not define terrorism or explain how the two organizations meet the criteria it names.Formal designation as Foreign Terrorist Organizations followed on 5 June 2026. Brazil’s federal government rejected the label, relying on its Anti-Terrorism Law, under which the perpetrator’s motive is one of the elements that determines whether conduct constitutes terrorism. The Brazilian government’s position therefore turned on a criterion that the U.S. designation did not address. Since then, public debate in Brazil has circled one question: are the PCC and CV terrorists or not?

Yet Brazil’s legal framework has been moving on without waiting for an answer. Over two decades, Brazil has built a body of law in which significant legal consequences associated with terrorism no longer depend on whether particular conduct or actors qualify as “terrorist”. At the same time, the legal conditions for applying the label have remained largely unresolved. The newest legislation makes this separation explicit. The debate over classification, in other words, concerns a label that no longer determines the legal consequences once associated with it.

This blog post traces how that separation came about, using the two organizations as its thread. This is not unique to Brazil; similar dynamics can be seen elsewhere. It is the local form of a global pattern in which counter-terrorism powers are turned against groups the label was never written for, from climate protesters charged as terrorists in the United Statesto the proscription of Palestine Action in the United Kingdom. The Brazilian case shows that once the legal consequences no longer depend on whether conduct or actors fall within the definition of terrorism, that definition ceases to constrain the exercise of public power. What remains is a form of discretion exercised without the concept that was meant to authorize it.

The Shadow of the Label

The Comando Vermelho (CV) was born in 1979 from an alliance between common criminals and political prisoners in Rio de Janeiro’s prisons, forged under the military dictatorship on the island of Ilha Grande, and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) from São Paulo’s prisons in 1993. Both began as prison collectives and became transnational enterprises. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the PCC in 2024 as Brazil’s most notorious organized crime group and described it as operating throughout South America. Researchers describe them as organizations closer to the State, or as alternative institutions that act as if they had a State form: they run local tribunals that resolve disputes and enforce debts, and they punish outside any framework. Residents in their territories must pay the factions for electricity, gas, and internet. Nevertheless, until 2026, Washington had never treated the PCC or the CV as terrorist organizations.

The designation is based on two legal authorities: The first, Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, lets the Secretary of State designate a foreign group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization if it engages in terrorist activity or in terrorism, or retains the capability and intent to do either, and if this threatens American nationals or United States national defense, foreign relations, or economic interests. In this regime, “terrorist activity” is a list of violent acts defined without reference to purpose, and “terrorism” is premeditated, politically motivated violence against noncombatants. This distinction matters in the PCC and CV case. Both organizations are primarily criminal enterprises driven by profit and territorial control, rather than groups organized around an ideological or political program. Their violence may therefore fall within the first route without satisfying the second, depending on how the applicable criteria are interpreted. The second is Executive Order 13224, issued weeks after September 2001, which authorizes the Secretary to designate groups as Global Terrorists without defining what constitutes an act of terrorism. The U.S. government designated both the CV and the PCC under the two regimes simultaneously, without indicating which of the applicable legal criteria the organizations were held to satisfy. The designation, therefore, obscures its normative basis: rather than identifying the legal criterion that authorized the classification, it leaves the grounds for the exercise of this power indeterminate.

Brazil rejected the designation the next day. An official note called national sovereignty non-negotiable and stated that the way crime is classified and fought in Brazil is decided by Brazilians through their own institutions and security forces. The legal grounds of that statement had been set out a year earlier by the National Secretary of Public Security, who refused an American request to designate the same two groups as terrorists. The director-general of the Federal Police called the equation a technical error, noting that these factions are profit-driven while terrorists are ideologically motivated. In the same vein, prosecutors and legal scholars warned that stretching the concept to cover profit-driven crime would create legal uncertainty by opening the category to political use. The debate even turned to diplomatic grounds when, in a written answer to the Chamber of Deputies, the Brazilian Foreign Minister stated that Brazil considers the designation a North American unilateral act and that such classification could be invoked to justify extraterritorial measures, including the military use of force, against Brazilian territory. The State Department’s spokesperson said no military action was contemplated. The argument went on regardless.

This is a local episode about a concept that has never been settled anywhere, and the reasons for that are structural. There is not one terrorism but many: the word has been applied to regicides and anarchists, anti-colonial fighters, revolutionary cells and religious movements, whose aims and methods share nothing beyond the fear they produce, and any definition wide enough to cover them all is too vague to decide a case. The word “terrorist” also carries a decidedly negative connotation, and that is not incidental to it. To call something terrorism is to condemn it rather than describe it, which is why states have never agreed on a formula that would reach their own violence, or that of the movements they support. What follows is a sort of definitional abstinence, where the legislator uses “terrorist” as an adjective while leaving the noun “terroism” undefined. As a result, where no one knows what terrorism is, anything can be declared to be it. What is distinctive about Brazil is how the legislator managed to use this concept without ever naming it.

Legislating in the Shadows

Law 13,260/2016 defines terrorism by reference to acts, which include the use or threatened use of explosives and other means of mass destruction. Those acts, however, qualify only when committed for reasons of xenophobia, discrimination or prejudice of race, color, ethnicity and religion, and with the purpose of provoking social or generalized terror and danger to persons, property, public peace or public safety. It follows that a discriminatory motive without one of those acts falls outside the offense, and that one of those acts without the motive falls outside the law’s scope as well. Brazilian scholarship warned from the start that the combination leaves wide latitude to authorities to assess whether the motives and purposes are present. The problem runs deeper, since motives are rarely pure and never operate alone. Economic purposes may remain the principal aim of both organizations, but they might be combined with acts of a discriminatory nature. The PCC maintains an internal code that punishes homosexuality among its members, while in territories controlled by the CV the practice of two main Afro religions called Umbanda and Candomblé is forbidden, and there is no evidence about the purpose of these acts. Since these rules are enforced through violence, the punishment of people on grounds of their sexuality and the expulsion of a religious practice from a territory held by force could potentially satisfy the statutory requirement concerning the underlying acts. Whether the conduct also satisfies the requirements concerning motive and purpose, however, cannot be established on the available evidence.

The reason for this uncertainty lies in the nature of a designation that turns on the purposes behind a group’s activity. Purpose is not a fact observable in the conduct itself; it is attributed to the group by whoever applies the definition, which is why provisions of this kind operate as a gateway for stereotypes about who the enemy is. This means that the enemy is a discursive construct before it becomes a legal category, and the formula “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” captures this dependence precisely. Recourse to a monetary criterion does not solve the problem, since enrichment serves ideological ends and ideological ends serve enrichment so that these activities form a continuum rather than a pair of opposites: organizations pursuing political ends finance themselves by crime, and armed factions holding territory extract resources and levies until the profit is reason enough to continue. Furthermore, because purposes also shift over time within the same organization, the criterion classifies a moment rather than a group. It therefore orders the phenomenon for analysis and decides nothing on its own. Brazilian law therefore neither includes nor excludes the two organizations. It hands the question to whoever is applying it, and the government’s denial is an exercise of that discretion rather than a reading compelled by the statute.

The 2026 legislature did not correct that discretion. The so-called anti-faction law creates the offense of structured social domination, committed by members of an “ultraviolent criminal organization” who use violence to impose control over territories, communities, or economic activity, obstruct police operations, attack prisons, or employ explosives and chemical, biological, and nuclear agents against public safety. This item reproduces almost word-for-word the first act listed in the 2016 statute. What separates the two offenses is a single clause, which makes the new one punishable regardless of the reasons or motivations behind it.

The 2026 law therefore does not answer the question Brasília and Washington had been arguing over. It sets it aside. The new category is as indeterminate as the old one, and it no longer requires the motive that had at least narrowed the earlier offense. This is what the first constitutional challenges now argue before the Supreme Federal Tribunal. The new offense also carries heavier consequences. It is punishable by twenty to forty years and falls within the constitutional category of the gravest crimes, which bars bail, pardon, and conditional release. Much of what once followed from the terrorism label now follows without the word, and more severely, making the dispute over the label largely beside the point and allowing the 2026 offense to displace the 2016 framework in this area. The cost falls beyond the factions, because the law shifts punishment towards the anticipated management of risk: a database entry presumes membership for administrative purposes, assets are frozen and sold before judgment, companies are placed under intervention and their shares sold, lawyer-client communications may be recorded, and the vote is withdrawn from everyone held in prison, convicted or not. Brazil refused the label and kept everything the label would have brought.

Shadows over Fundamental Rights

Brazil reproduces, domestically, the way global counterterrorism has operated since 2001. In this context, the missing definition is not an oversight in that order but the thing that makes it work, since what states gain is precisely the combination of hardening obligations and an absent definitional limit on their reach. Decree 3,976/2001, issued weeks after Resolution 1373, obliged authorities to freeze assets fifteen years before any domestic definition of terrorism existed. Law 13,810/2019 made those designations immediately enforceable here and placed the duty to execute them on private parties (among others, banks, brokers and notaries). Review comes afterward and cannot reach the merits, since the objection the sanctioned person may file does not suspend the measure. As a result, freezing an account, blocking a transaction, and entering a name in a register are administrative acts, and administrative acts carry none of the guarantees that criminal law attaches to the deprivation of property or liberty. There is no public charge or sanctions, so there is nothing to answer. There is no trial or due process, so the presumption of innocence is not engaged on its own terms. Rights are restricted all the same, without any reason or answer.

The controversy over whether the PCC and the CV are terrorist organizations therefore asks the wrong constitutional question. The constitutional problem is therefore not the indeterminacy of terrorism as a concept, but the gradual disappearance of the legal threshold that once confined the exercise of exceptional powers. Over the past two decades, Brazilian law has progressively detached the exceptional legal consequences historically associated with counterterrorism from the concept that was meant to justify them. Once legal consequences no longer depend on the conditions that authorize them, legal definitions cease to limit public power and become largely symbolic. The debate over terrorism continues to dominate public attention, yet the decisive transformation has occurred elsewhere: in the weakening of the legal constraints on exceptional public powers, leaving fundamental rights and due process in the shadows of a legal orderin which discretion increasingly precedes definition.