“Silence is a friend who never cheats”?

Narratives of public actors from São Paulo and Minas Gerais about the actions of the PCC

Abstract

This article aims to understand how public actors in São Paulo and Minas Gerais describe the expansion of the criminal organization Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in their respective states. Based on data collected through interviews, official documents, and newspaper reports, the study explores processes that, although occurring in different localities and temporal contexts, share similarities in the ways they are addressed. In São Paulo, over the first two decades of the 2000s, a gap emerged between the narratives of government officials and those of state agents directly involved in crime control. While high-ranking authorities frequently adopted a discourse of denial and minimization regarding the PCC’s power and capillarity, such stance was not observed among frontline agents. In Minas Gerais, public discourse was initially marked by silence, particularly among high-level institutional actors, who avoided openly addressing the PCC’s influence. However, once the group’s actions began to affect urban routines, actors in both states started to publicly articulate their perceptions and to disclose the measures adopted to repress the organization.