RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 12, (AP): Criminal gangs are operating in over a third of municipalities in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest driving a boom in violence, according to a report published Wednesday by a prominent nonprofit organization. Gangs were present this year in 260 of 772 municipalities in the region, compared with 178 in 2023, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.

The entrenchment of "mafia-like” organizations - particularly the Red Command and First Capital Command (PCC) - "greatly aggravate the situation in the Legal Amazon, which is now seen as a very strategic territory for transnational trafficking, with the circulation of different illicit goods,” the report said. The Legal Amazon is an area in nine states of Brazil that's home to the largest hydrographic basin in the world.

Of the 260 municipalities where organized crime groups are present, Red Command controls fully half, up from one-fourth last year, forum president Renato Sérgio de Lima told The Associated Press. Red Command expanded into cities in Brazil's northern region after PCC took control of the drug trafficking route via Ponta Pora, a municipality on the border with Paraguay in the center-west region.

Red Command has since swallowed up some local factions that no longer function autonomously, Lima said. The fact that gangs are securing monopolies on criminal activities could help explain the 6.2% drop in violent deaths across the region from 2021 to 2023, authors wrote in the third edition of the report titled "Cartographies of Violence in the Amazon.”

However, "the internalization of violence to rural and forest areas has made small, quiet municipalities some of the most violent in the country,” they said. The killings of Indigenous peoples expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in 2022 threw into sharp relief the increase in violence in the region. They were traveling along the Itaquai River near the entrance of the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, which borders Peru and Colombia, when they were attacked.

Their bodies were dismembered, burned and buried. Brazilian police have formally charged a Colombian fish trader as the person who planned their slayings. The killings were motivated by Pereira’s efforts to monitor and enforce environmental laws in the region, police have said. Phillips was working on a book about Amazon preservation.