After nearly two months on the run, the Amazon outlaws nicknamed Hammerhead and Armadillo may have felt they were nearing the home straight, albeit a long and muddy one.
Just beyond the Tocantins River lay the Trans-Amazon Highway, a desolate and poorly patrolled jungle road that traverses more than 1,200 miles from east to west through the largest rainforest on Earth. After completing that grueling journey, the fugitives reportedly hoped to sneak across the border to Bolivia, far from the jurisdiction of Brazilian law.
Then, at about 1:30 p.m. last Thursday, federal police thwarted the daring plan and stopped the fugitives from approaching the bridge into the Amazonian city of Maraba. “He started panicking and wandering around the store,” one police officer said of convicted murderer Hammerhead, whose real name is Rogelio Mendonza.
A bullet was fired. The men were captured. And 51 days after two people somehow escaped from a high-security federal prison in the northeastern Brazilian city of Mossoro, one of the most dramatic manhunts in recent Brazilian history has come to an end. “They are back where they came from,” said Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, praising the “victory of the Brazilian nation.”
The detention of Mendonça and his accomplice Deiveson Nascimento comes at a time when the Brazilian government is under intense pressure to explain how two extremely dangerous felons were able to escape from a supposedly safe location. It gave me a sense of relief.
But the movie Jailbreak also explores how Brazil’s two most powerful criminal factions, the Red Command (CV) in Rio and the First Metropolitan Command (PCC) in São Paulo, have in recent years exploited drug trafficking routes. It has been revealed that the company has dramatically expanded its presence on Amazon. and markets such as gold mining and land grabbing and other lucrative illegal economies.
CV members Mendonça and Nascimento are from Acre, Amazon state, where they participated in the 2023 rebellion, killing five members of rival factions, three of whom were beheaded, before being transferred to Mossoro. was in prison. .
Nascimento, 33, said to be one of the first members of Acre’s CV, was arrested in 2015 in a small Amazonian border town called Brasileia and sentenced to more than 80 years in prison. His rap sheet includes human trafficking, robbery, and even the kidnapping of a Bolivian politician.
Mendonça, 35, also known as Cherub, is reportedly serving a 74-year sentence for crimes including robbery and ordering the murder of a teenage boy on the Acre border with Amazonas state in 2021. There is.
At the time of their arrest last week, the two were driving through Pará, another Amazon state, and fled hundreds of miles up Brazil’s coastline in a small fishing boat before fleeing the state capital, an important CV base. I was visiting Belém.
Aira Couto, a Belem-based security expert, believes the pair fled to the Amazon because of the region’s strategic importance to these groups. “That is why they came to Pará state over four other states… Maraba is the city where the Red Army Command and PCC are located. Before that, they came via Moqueiro Island and Belém. So the fact that there is an organization that provides them with support and logistics again shows the relationships that these groups have in the Amazon region,” said Couto, the Brazilian researcher. Forum on public safety.
Experts say CV and PCC began expanding into the Amazon about a decade ago, and the region has become particularly important to the former after the assassination of a drug trafficker on the Brazil-Paraguay border in 2016. It becomes. This killing allowed the PCC to take control of a smuggling corridor focused on Brazil’s midwestern border, forcing the CV to look north to the Amazon.
But Brazil’s prison system itself has also been accused of helping criminal gangs from the southeast set up camps in the Amazon. “One of the factors that led to the expansion of these criminal organizations into other states, especially the northern and northeastern states, was the growth in prison systems, mass incarceration, and prison populations. And the transfer of prisoners from state prisons to federal prisons. was also carried out,” Couto said.
Criminal leaders from across Brazil inadvertently unite after being transferred From prisons in their home countries to maximum security prisons elsewhere. “This created contacts between these organizations that allowed them to expand and spread their work throughout Brazil,” Couto said. At the same time, organizations that previously controlled only their own states began to have “representatives” in other regions, such as the Amazon.
It’s unclear how long the hammerhead and armadillo spent planning their escape. Flavia Froese, a Rio-based lawyer representing the men, told local media that they decided to flee after being treated poorly. “I had to run away because I was buried alive,” Froese said. Quote Mendonsa said:
The men put their plan into action in the early hours of February 14, the last day of Carnival, when the justice minister later said Brazilians were “more relaxed.” Said reporters.
At the time of the prison break, the criminals were in the cell next door. One of them reportedly used rebar in the wall to cut through a window before climbing through the duct and onto the roof. There, the men discovered tools left behind by construction workers renovating part of the prison. They escaped by using pliers to break through the surrounding fence. It wasn’t until 90 minutes later that security guards noticed their absence.
The escape triggered a massive investigation. Hundreds of police searched the countryside for the Amazon fugitive. “It was like something out of a movie. Lots of helicopters. Lots of drones,” Mendonsa said. I overheard him talking to his girlfriend. on the phone. ” [searchers] They were so close to us that we could smell their stinky boots. ”
After hiding near the prison for about a month, they arrived at a seaside fishing village called Icapui and headed to Belém, close to one of the Amazon’s largest ports and therefore an important location for smugglers moving south. and sailed north for six days. American cocaine goes to Europe. From there they were driven south to Maraba by four CV men, where their sensational escape came to an abrupt end.
The next day they returned to Mosoro.Hammerhead’s mother, Nelita Nogueira da Silva Said Local TV: “They will rot in prison.”
